


Betty White's Ten Tips For Living A Long And Happy Life

by Chiomi



Series: Get Sharp [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BAMF Stiles, Gore, M/M, Magic, Magic!Stiles, POV Stiles, Sheriff Stilinski Finds Out, self-harm for ritual purposes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:25:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has been at the end of his rope for months, and it keeps not getting better.</p><p>Now there are ghosts in the woods, and they have to find a way to end it before anyone new dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 10. Get at least eight hours of beauty sleep, nine if you’re ugly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic isn't tagged as slow build, because you don't get the payoff here. Yeah, stuff happens, but most of the shipping stuff is groundwork and foundations.

When his phone goes off, Stiles doesn’t even check to see who it is. There are a limited number of people who’d call to wake him up from a dead sleep, and all of them mean emergency.

“Wha’z’t?”

Isaac sounds panicked when he says, “Ghosts!”

The panic wakes him up, because Isaac likes to pretend he’s a dangerous creature of the night who isn’t afraid of anything. And yeah, he’s a dangerous creature of the night, but he’s the least dangerous creature of the night Stiles knows. “Where are you?”

“The woods - fuck, please hurry.”

He keeps his voice level and dry, even as he’s hauling his pants on one-handed. “Real helpful, Isaac. Where am I picking you up?”

“Uh. Highway 36. I’ll just run towards town until I see you.” 

“I’ll be there are soon as I can.” Stiles jams on his shoes and throws his hoodie over the shirt he’d been sleeping in, then grabs his keys. He swarms down the stairs without regard for sound, because with half the Sheriff’s department dead, his dad is working even longer hours than usual.

He starts the Jeep and drives to the end of the road and doesn’t accelerate it to loud until he’s turned the corner, because the last thing he needs is a noise complaint from the neighbours. It’s ass o’clock in the morning, so as long as he doesn’t speed through downtown he should be fine. Stiles scrubs the sleeve of his hoodie across his cheek to take off the residue of drool. He’d gotten something like an hour and a half of sleep, and still managed to turn himself into a mess. At least the phone call had come before the nightmares, tonight.

He speeds out past the turn-off that would lead him to the shell of the Hale house and slows to 65 so he’ll be able to stop as soon as he spots Isaac. His reflexes have been twitchy as hell the past year, but twitchy doesn’t mean accurate and he does not want to go any closer to the ghost than he has to.

Anything that scares Isaac enough to call is not going to be Casper. And there he is, running down the middle of the lane like he isn’t expecting a high-speed Jeep. Stiles swings the wheel hard and steps on the brake. Isaac wrenches the passenger door open as a white figure becomes visible down the highway.

Stiles accelerates into the turn to get them pointed back towards Beacon Hills and then floors it. “Didn’t you used to dig graves? Shouldn’t this not freak you out anymore?”

Isaac’s breathing is almost back to normal despite the sweat pouring off him. “Ghosts weren’t real, then.”

“So what did it do? How did it try to attack you?” Lydia had finished her translation of the Argent bestiary, and Stiles has a copy on his computer, but he hasn’t memorized it yet. He's barely read it through once, because it had taken a long time for Lydia to finish it after Jackson defected to the alpha pack and took off and she was questioned in his missing person case. Stiles had done what he could to make it easier on her, but there was only so much he could do when the most respected lawyer in town was screaming for blood. He probably could have done more if he hadn’t been helping Scott and the Argents with their hunt for Gerard and Derek with his alpha pack problems. He tells himself that he wouldn’t have been able to do more if he’d had more time over the summer, because she was the last one to have seen him according to the official story.

But he only believes that half the time.

“It grabbed me and it just went through me and then everywhere it grabbed was so cold.”

“Right, so standard horror movie effects. Did you see if your game face scared it off?” He can’t remember anything about ghosts in the bestiary, which means he’ll be asking Doc Deaton if his search tonight doesn’t turn anything up.

Isaac looks out the window. “I just ran. Ghosts aren’t supposed to be real, Stiles.”

“Neither are werewolves.” The ridiculousness of a werewolf claiming that something doesn’t exist kind of makes him want to just put his head back and laugh, but he knows he wouldn’t be able to stop and it would freak out Isaac. “Why were you even out there? It wasn’t some weird werewolf thing, was it? It’s not even a quarter moon.”

“Derek smelled hunters in the woods today. I was investigating.” He says it with quiet pride, as if it’s a big thing to be actually told to go sniff around the woods and see if anything chases him.

Stiles contemplates that this, right here, is his life, where it actually kind of is an honor, even if mostly because Derek’s been questioning Isaac’s loyalties and lacrosse practices with Scott a lot. “Did it seriously not occur to him to just text Chris? That’s a thing he can do now. That’s a thing everyone can do, because Creepy Grandpa is gone and Chris actually wants the body count in Beacon Hills to stop topping national averages and cooperation is a thing.”

“I - Derek says that the Argents are Scott’s thing, and that we don’t have any kind of agreement with them as a pack.” Isaac’s voice has a faint edge of uncertainty, as if he’s only now starting to see that there might have been a better way to deal with this than calling for a getaway driver who was finally, finally getting some sleep.

“Did he actually use words and explain things voluntarily? Or were you going to tell Scott and he shut you down?” Stiles runs a hand over his hair in frustration. “You know what, don’t answer that. Where am I even taking you?”

The train station had been abandoned after Gerard decided that failure to turn him should be rewarded with aconite flashbangs, and Stiles has no idea where Derek’s living now. Probably the woods again, where he can multi-task moping and lurking. Isaac looks a little clean to have been living in the woods, though. The dirt on him looks fresh, not ingrained, and he doesn’t actually smell. So obviously he’s somewhere with running water. Unless they all kind of lurk menacingly at the gym in their off-hours, which Stiles really wouldn’t put past Derek.

“Derek’s apartment.”

“Wait, he has an apartment? Since when? What’s the address?” He’s known Derek almost a year, and in that time he’s been pretty sure Derek was living out of the wreck of his family home and then an abandoned rail car.

Isaac gives the address, then squirms. “He got it when he turned me. Peter said that it was time to move on, and that we needed somewhere secure that no one knew about.”

“No one - great, so I’m still on the do-not-trust list. Why am I on the do-not-trust list but still an emergency contact? Are you even supposed to have told me?” He probably isn’t supposed to have mentioned it, and the defensive set of Isaac’s jaw confirms it. A whole line of thought about how Isaac’s been getting along really well with Scott and tends to gravitate to Scott’s side at their horrible tense group meetings and how shitty his friends are for making Isaac choose sides pops up. Yelling at Isaac won’t fix it, though, so instead he goes with, “Oh my god, he had sinister lairs specifically to lurk in menacingly?”

“And for training, and for the full moon. It’s this building.”

Stiles pulls left into the parking lot and looks up at the building through the windshield. It looks surprisingly normal, like the inhabitants would judge Derek for tromping mud into the hall more than for being a werewolf.

Isaac unbuckles his seatbelt and turns to the door. He pauses, looking back at Stiles with a miserable expression. “Don’t tell Scott?”

About the ghosts or about where Derek lives, Stiles wants to ask, but he’s pretty sure the answer is both, so he just nods. “Of course not. Now get back inside and see if Peter can dig up any information on ghosts from his laptop.”

Isaac nods and slips out, shutting the door quietly behind him. Stiles rolls his eyes as he drives away, muttering to himself that no, of course he can’t say thank you. Big bad werewolves never say thank you. That’s just obligatory muttering, though, to keep his mouth moving while he examines the concept of ghosts and the reasons Isaac would call him first.

The pack, what there was of it, is falling apart. Scott won’t follow Derek anywhere, and yeah, Stiles can’t blame him for it because Derek is bad at sharing plans and being reassuring that he’s not going to get everyone killed. Erica and Boyd don’t seem to notice, but Stiles would be surprised if they did, after the way their rescue had gone down. He fully expects them to follow Derek into hell, now, if they’re asked to, never mind that it was Stiles’ plan. In a lot of ways it doesn’t matter that it was Stiles’ plan, because Derek was the one who hauled them both bodily out of the fire.

He flexes his hand on the steering wheel, stretching out the fingers that are recently healed from the breaks Gerard inflicted. This sucks. Everything sucks. He pulls into his driveway and races for his room again. Taking the stairs two at a time means that it’s okay to be breathing too hard, means it’s exertion and not an impending panic attack. If he can fob it off, pretend it’s something else, it will go away enough that he won’t have to feel like he’s drowning. He hates the crushing lack of air. He hates being so violently in over his head.

It hadn’t gotten better over the summer. It had only gotten worse, with more injuries and more distrust and more werewolves. But Stiles grabs his laptop and it’s his lifeline, because with it in hand he’s not helpless. With his information and his planning, he can help. He can coordinate the efforts that will keep the people he cares about alive.

He’d been hoping it would calm down, with Gerard dead and the alpha pack gone. He’d been hoping for things like lacrosse games with only normal human levels of bloodshed and no dead bodies, and for everyone to forget the couple of months that Erica and Boyd had disappeared. The mandatory counselling sessions with the new guidance counselor aren’t helping anyone forget, but at least they added a sheen of normalcy, of adults being in control and taking care of things.

Stiles turns on his laptop and opens the database of supernatural creatures and relevant data that he’s been cobbling together. It has entries for creatures, with habitat and how they come to be and how to kill them, and lots and lots of entries for werewolves. Everything is tagged with the source of the information, who knows it, who’s allowed to know it, and who’s expressly forbidden from ever finding out. Stiles inputs Derek’s address, and flags it as no one being allowed to know. Lydia will have things to say about everyone’s maturity level when she reads it, but Lydia’s been saying excessively sharp things ever since she brought Jackson back to life. All of her help at this point is conditional on never being left in the dark again. Stiles is more than happy to comply with the information-sharing, because Lydia puts together information in ways he never would. It’s also nice, really nice, to have someone he isn’t allowed to keep secrets from. He’s been keeping secrets from his dad since Scott was bitten, and now he’s started keeping secrets from Scott.

Yeah, Scott would get himself or someone else hurt if he knew, but it still makes Stiles feel like utter shit to be keeping secrets from his best friend. Scott isn’t exactly rational about Derek, but Derek still needs help. Stiles isn’t going to refuse to help someone who’d saved his life as often as Derek had. So he searches ‘ghost’ and/or ‘apparition’ and/or ‘spirit’ and turns up . . . nothing. Great.

He opens the document holding the translated bestiary and starts searching there. He has a while before he has to start getting ready for school.


	2. 9. Exercise. Or don’t. What the hell do I care?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple notes - the first chapter has been edited for some lingering verb tense problems. With this chapter, I actually waited for my beta to read all of it! My beta, AlwaysBoth, also keeps linking me heartbreaking gifsets of Stiles. When I make high-pitched whining distressed noises, she laughs, and then I go write more of this.
> 
> Tags have been updated - mind them, as triggers, yo.

Adderall makes sleep irrelevant. He can focus as well as usual no matter how much sleep he’s had. Just because ‘as well as usual’ involves jittering his knee constantly and not being able to find his notebook five fucking minutes after he put it in his backpack and only keeping track of his pen because it’s in his mouth doesn’t mean he should cut out research time for sleep. It’s not hurting him any. It’s not hurting him, and the research could help someone else.

If he gathers all the knowledge he can, he might be able to avoid adding to his collection of nightmares. Lydia, lying covered in her own blood, Scott lost in things he can’t control, Boyd and Erica strung up and hurting, Derek’s head dipping under the water because Stiles’ grip slipped, and the uncertainty as to whether he’d be able to pull him up again. A little sleep is nothing compared to what they might lose if Stiles can’t figure out the next threat. The next threat in this case appears to be ghosts, but Stiles’ information has not been helpful so far. There’s nothing in the Argent bestiary, so he falls back on wikipedia. Stiles makes a bulleted list of potential criteria in his notebook, because he doesn’t have is computer here and the format he set up there helps him think things through.

Location  
Circumstances (pd)  
Circumstances (d)  
Circumstances (b)  
Person (d)  
Person (other)

He leaves them as vague as possible, because circumstances of death and witches/shamans are not things he wants anyone who borrows his History notes to wonder about. Location he puts a question mark next to, because, while they’ve had a lot of murders in Beacon Hills, it might be a specific place in the woods. Obviously it’s not just murder that causes it, otherwise they’d be wading through ghosts every day.

The circumstances of burial might do something - he remembers the wolfsbane at Laura’s body. He hasn’t been involved in any of the Hunter body-hiding, though, so he needs to check with Chris to see if they do something different. Maybe also with Peter, though he still gets the creeps from him.

Stiles makes a note to talk to him anyway. When she sees his notes, Lydia might do it. She’s still afraid of him because he stripped away her mind, but she deals with it by making him do her bidding. She is just ridiculously brave and smart and attractive and in love with Jackson. He kind of stares at the back of her head, where her hair is kind of half caught up in some kind of braid thing and cascades down her back like a perfect strawberry blonde waterfall.

This helpless yearning is almost a comfort now, because it’s the only thing that’s constant.

“Stilinski! If you’d be so kind as to re-join us, maybe you could tell us what you know about the civil rights movement in 1968?” His brain goes white. Why do people ask him questions? “The riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination and the protests slash riots at the Democratic National Convention were thought to be worse because it was unusually hot that year and civil disturbances rise in almost direct proportion to temperature, though the weather wasn’t thought to play a part in Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol.”

Stiles is familiar with the quality of silence that follows. What had they even been talking about? The teacher asked him about 1968, and he talked about 1968. It was totally on-topic.

When class lets out for lunch, Lydia laces an arm through his. “You’re not writing about Valerie Solanas for our research paper.”

Stiles grins. Lydia criticizing his potential essay topics is the most delightfully normal thing that’s happened to him in days. “I don’t know, SCUM Manifesto would be a really interesting resource.”

“No,” she says. “I’m writing about loss of intellectual property and the paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis, and you’re not touching her because you know what I’ll do to you. What are you doing for real?”

“Herblock. I’m thinking introduction, eight pages of political cartoons, conclusion and bibliography. It’ll be great.” He’s outlined the paper already, because he never knew when something would come up that would have him skipping school or spending all of his off-hours running for his life instead of doing homework.

Lydia considers, then nods. “So what’re we doing for Allison’s birthday this year?”

Stiles pauses, long enough to throw Lydia off her step. She glances at him in irritation and tugs his arm slightly to get him moving again. “Why are you even asking me? Don’t you usually just invent something fabulous that makes any attempt the rest of us make look inadequate? Well, except for Scott, but Scott’s a giant puppy and you really can’t beat that.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Things are different this year. Half of Allison’s friends wouldn’t be welcome at a surprise party we threw at her house, for one.”

And the other half weren’t in the know, which would be kind of uncomfortable, especially if they were dealing with pack dynamics all night. If it was just the four of them, that could work, though it’d end up with Allison and Scott making out and Lydia and Stiles researching and that would be basically every other Friday night for them. She’d probably appreciate Isaac’s presence, but definitely not Erica’s. Boyd she almost got along with, especially since the showdown with Gerard where he was the most careful of any of them to incapacitate hunters with minimal injury. “How do party planners even do it? Everyone hates each other.”

Lydia raises both eyebrows at him in expectation. “I’m pretty sure Scott doesn’t hate Allison, just her new boyfriend.”

This time Stiles stops and doesn’t start again until Lydia is forced to turn and look at him. “She has a boyfriend that’s not Scott?”

“Obviously. She needs someone to soothe her wounds over shooting a bunch of people.”

This is more than he needs to deal with right now. Lydia is trying to literally explode his brain by trying to make him navigate this. “No, you know what? Lunch first - we’ve got other stuff to deal with.”

He lines up behind her and stares at the cafeteria food, which looks persistently gross. He needs to eat, but he’s only going to be able to get through a bit right now before his Adderall decides that he’s not allowed to eat any more. So apple for later, because he can get away with it in his last period class, and sandwich and water for now. When he’s paid, he looks around for Allison and spots her with some blond guy he thinks he knows from English. Stiles isn’t sure, because the guy is basically the perfect picture of nondescript. He glares at Allison, because while he’s perfectly capable of explaining what’s going on to all of the werewolves while they’re half a cafeteria away, he needs to talk to her face to face and it’s going to be really hard to do so with her boyfriend right there.

She makes a questioning face at him, and he glares harder, then flicks his gaze to the guy next to her. She rolls her eyes at him, and she’s not getting it, but Lydia’s sliding into her seat across from her and Stiles sets down his tray next to hers. “So I was thinking about ghosts last night.”

“Stiles, this is Brien. Brien, this is Stiles, he never shuts up.” Allison makes the introductions lightly enough, like she’s never threatened to shoot him if his information was wrong.

“And I was thinking that with the number of weird deaths and animal attacks” - slight emphasis, continued glaring - “we get, it’s amazing we don’t have more ghost stories.” Stiles unwraps his sandwich and takes a bit and chews it once, twice before continuing, “And I was thinking what makes a ghost. Is it where they died, or like something that happened before they died, or how they died, or how they were buried, or who they were, or who killed them? Those ghost hunter shows never go into why a place is haunted, not really, they’re all about recording fractional temperature drops and panicked camera angles. I’d really love actual concrete data about these things. It’s a shame everything on the internet is bullshit and there aren’t any good books on the subject.”

Allison is paying attention, finally, taking on that intense focus she usually saves for sprees of violence or making out with Scott. “Well, aren’t the best ghost stories told around campfires? No one writes those down. Anyway, my dad was saying there’s a house in the woods that might be haunted.”

Stiles resists the urge to grind his teeth. Of course there were things that the Argents weren’t sharing. It’s not like anything could ever go right in his life or anyone could stop acting like dicks. “We should definitely check that out. After school?”

“Don’t you have lacrosse practice?” Lydia asks.

Stiles shrugs. “I’m pretty sure the championship game was a fluke. Finstock’s probably going to replace me on first line with a freshman or something, and I doubt missing practice once is going to change that inevitability.”

It’s not inevitable, he knows it’s not. Over the summer he hadn’t had that much time to practice, but he had whenever they were free and not in imminent danger of death, and he’s had lots of practice sprinting. He’s fast, and fearless about checking other players, and there’s no reason he can’t stay on first line this year and maybe actually play in more than one game. Except ghosts are dead people, and more potential deaths rank way, way higher on his list of priorities than staying on first line.

“Going to see a haunted house sounds fun,” volunteers Brien, like he thinks he’s coming along.

Lydia smiles, big and obviously fake, “Unfortunately there’s not a lot of room in Stiles’ Jeep.”

“Oh. We could go in my car?”

Allison slips her hand over his and squeezes. “Didn’t you have that make-up quiz for Algebra this afternoon? Besides, we should take the Jeep - the roads are really rough out that way.”

Brien deflates a little, but Allison kisses the side of his mouth and he cheers back up. Stiles glares at her some more, because he’s had to deal with Scott pining ridiculously over her and rambling about true love and how he’ll wait for her and how wolves mate for life. He wishes she weren’t necessary and useful, so that he could stop talking to her completely. If she weren’t around at all, Scott might eventually stop pining quite so enthusiastically.

He finishes his sandwich and toys with his water bottle as Lydia starts asking Allison what she wants for her birthday in terms of presents and celebration. Allison just looks sad and uncomfortable and says they don’t need to do anything, and Stiles excuses himself and puts his tray away.

In the hall outside the cafeteria, there’s a blind spot in the cameras. Of course, it’s a blind spot everyone knows about, so he shoos away a couple making out so that he can text the wolves.

**Isaac knows the location. Strictly recon, one wolf as backup. Not Scott.**

He sends another one just to Scott.

**sorry man**

A text comes in from Lydia, and he opens it because even though he knows it’ll be a demand, he is completely incapable of ignoring her.

**Figure out what we’re doing for Allison’s birthday. I’m not coming this afternoon.**

He doesn’t reply, but that’s about as far as his ability to resist her goes. She knows it, too. He’s pretty sure she’s mentally vivisected him and is just going to push his buttons until he does exactly what she wants, whatever that is. Allison’s birthday party doesn’t feel like an endgame thing, even from Lydia. So ‘figure out what Lydia’s up to’ and ‘plan Allison’s birthday party why me oh god why me’ both go on his mental to-do list.

His afternoon classes see his notebook fill with notes and speculation, little of it about the classwork. He meets Allison in the parking lot, where she’s leaning against his Jeep and fidgeting with the strap of her bag.

He unlocks the doors and hops in the driver’s side and closes his door a little too hard. “So, ghosts. Why aren’t they in the bestiary?”

“They’re not exactly beasts, Stiles.” She does up her seatbelt and props her elbow on the door, looking out the window.

He huffs out an annoyed breath. “I thought we were doing full disclosure now, where people let me know what’s going to try and kill us all this week.”

“I only found out about ghosts yesterday. A couple guys on patrol were seeing white lights in the woods, so my dad filled me in on ghosts and we went to look for the body yesterday, but we didn’t find it. My dad says we need to salt the bones and burn them.”

Stiles thumps his head back against the headrest. At least now he doesn’t need to stop by and see Deaton. “Grocery store it is, then.”

He starts the Jeep and pulls out of the parking lot at a crawl with everyone else.

“Um, Stiles? Did you miss the part where we couldn’t find it?” Allison asks with just that hint of incredulity he’s gotten ridiculously sick of.

“Werewolves, Allison. Freaking werewolves with their freaky werewolf noses who can smell dead bodies. We have them! We have lots of them. They don’t like ghosts, either.”

“Is that how you found out?”

He takes a deep breath, lets it out. If she’d only found out last night, she might have been planning to tell someone else today or was still trying to figure out who to tell. It isn’t like she’s really friends with any of the werewolves who might have helped, just exes and the attempted murderer of, and the whole alliance thing is probably going to take a while to sink in. “Yeah. For some reason when hunters were poking around in the woods for no apparent reason, Derek got curious. Isaac went to investigate and found a ghost and I got to go pick him up.”

He should really be getting some kind of gas allowance for all the pack business he ends up driving for. Never going to happen, of course. Not least because Peter’s still a missing person from a hospital and Derek, as far as he knows, doesn’t work at all. Not that he apparently knows much, because _apartment_.

They stop at the grocery store and pick up a box of table salt, not speaking except for Stiles to confirm that it doesn’t need to be smoked salt from the Dead Sea or anything, and get back in the Jeep.

He drives out to the highway again, and slows once they’re past the city limits. “Okay, how do I get to this place?”

“Right up here.”

The gravel driveway she indicates is overgrown, but still level. Stiles drives until he can see a roof, then parks. Approaching on foot will be quieter and less conspicuous. Allison rummages in her bag, pulls out a folded crossbow and bolts and gets everything ready to go before she opens the door. Stiles eyes her warily before he gets out, too. “Let’s check the house first.”

“It’s really only a cabin - one room. And we checked it.”

He grins at her. “Cop’s kid. I always want to check everything twice.”

She rolls her eyes at him, but opens the cabin door with a flourish to show him in.

Stiles surveys the walls and floors carefully, but there’s really nothing obviously off other than the footprints in the dust. “Hey, could use a werewolf in here,” he shouts, knowing whoever decided to come will hear.

Allison is making faces at him like she has no idea what he’s doing and really doesn’t want to see anyone. He shrugs.

Boyd appears at her shoulder, and she startles badly, the crossbow coming up. He lifts an eyebrow at it, and she lowers it and looks away from him. “You needed something, Stiles?”

“Yeah. Can you smell human remains in here?”

His nose scrunches up. “It stinks of death in here in general.” Boyd ducks all the way in and sniffs and walks around, raising more dust. “This corner, though. Under the floor.”

Stiles takes a step in his direction, salt still clutched under one arm. “Great. Is there any kind of hidden trap door or anything?”

Boyd just looks at him, then slams an arm through the floorboards and pries one up. Right, the whole werewolf strength thing. There’s a dirty rug under the floorboards, and when Boyd pulls it up, a wooden box.

“Well, shit.”

“This is what you’re looking for, right?”

Stiles nods. “Yeah. Now we just need to get it open and then burn it.”

Boyd prises off the lid of the makeshift coffin, and Stiles and Allison both gag at the smell that rolls out of it. There’s still rotted meat on the bones, and shreds of fabric half-melted to that. Stiles covers his mouth with his sleeve and empties the container of salt over the visible portion of the torso. It’ll have to work, have to be good enough, because no way is he setting up some kind of fancy pyre.

He pulls the matches out of his pocket and lights one with a shaking hand, then drops it in. There’s a flare of yellow and a slight smell of spoiled pork, and then it goes out. Dammit.

“Boyd, can you grab the emergency kit from my Jeep?”

“All of it?”

Stiles bites his lip and thinks of accelerants. “No, just the jerry can and the firestarter and the . . . yeah, no, that’s it. Thanks.”

Boyd disappears briefly.

Allison looks green. “How can you stand this?”

“Yeah, I’m totally here because I want to be. Corpses are way better than lacrosse.”

“God, Stiles, you can be such an asshole. I just meant - this is horrible.”

Stiles shoves his hands in his pockets. “We do what we have to.”

She looks back out the door, where Boyd is jogging back with the jerry can. “You don’t _have_ to look after all us monsters.”

Stiles looks at her and something in his chest hurts. But Boyd is handing him the firestarter even as he starts unscrewing the top of the jerry can and pouring gasoline into the coffin.

The next attempt at body-burning is a lot more successful, and the flames turn blue and green and a shriek blows through the cabin. The reek of ozone follows in its wake.

Boyd looks sharply at the door. “We’ve got company. Hunters.”

Stiles’ first instinct is to run, but hunters don’t necessarily mean pain and death anymore. He makes himself take a breath, but Allison is already out the door, shouting, “We should go!”

Boyd is right after her, and he’s faster than her, even carrying an awkward jerry can. Stiles sprints after them, too, and he’s right on their heels until he trips.

He goes sprawling, because the universe hates him. The universe hates him and he makes excellent life decisions, like desecrating corpses instead of going to practice.

Chris Argent appears from the forest like a terrifying and heavily armed ninja. “Stiles?”

Stiles rolls to his side and waves. Another hunter, emerging from the forest, keeps a rifle levelled on him. Chris gestures to him to put the gun down.

“Stiles, you know this is private property and the scene of a suspected murder, right?”

“Nope, no idea, sir. No one ever tells me anything. My friends just told me to come out here for a cool haunted house.”

Chris slings his rifle over his shoulder and comes close enough to offer Stiles a hand up. He hauls Stiles to his feet and puts his free hand on Stiles’ shoulder. “You might want to choose your friends better.”

Stiles nods and smiles, open and friendly. “Yeah, I think next time I’ll see if Allison has any friends clumsier than me who can come along with us.”

The hand on his shoulder tightens. “We’re going to talk about this later.”

The hunter who’d been aiming at Stiles looks into the cabin and shouts towards them, “The body’s on fire.”

Stiles let’s his smile fall away. “Yes, we really are. But right now, I have homework, so I’m going to go. Please email me everything you have on ghosts.”

He pulls away and walks back to his Jeep. Boyd is waiting next to it, looking ready to spring to Stiles’ defense. “Allison, you can probably catch a ride back with your dad, if you want.”

She slides bonelessly from the passenger side, sheepish. “Oh. I’ll see you at school tomorrow, I guess.”

“Yeah. Boyd, get in, I’ll drop you off at the warehouse.”

Boyd climbs in and turns the radio to NPR as they drive back towards town. Derek’s current lair is an abandoned warehouse that has a For Rent sign that looks older than Stiles hanging out front. Inside, Erica is throwing Isaac into things - mostly walls, also some crates that appear to be full of stuffed animals. Derek is observing them from a corner, where he’s doing one-armed pushups. He’s shirtless, which is patently cheating.

Stiles walks to join him, fisting his hands in his pockets. He keeps his voice low, so even if the other werewolves hear him - which they almost definitely will - they’ll know not to join in. “Your inability to communicate means I’m running on no sleep and I had to light someone on fire today. I’m human. I shouldn’t be doing a better job of taking care of your pack than you are. And this bullshit about not telling me about the apartment? What if I needed to find you and you weren’t answering your phone? I wouldn’t have any idea where to look. If saving your fucking life however many times doesn’t make you trust me, nothing will, but you need to either start or cut me loose, because I can’t do this the way things are right now.”

Derek doesn’t look at him, just continues the smooth movement.

Stiles glares at the back of his head, then turns on his heel and stomps out. He really does have homework.


	3. 8. Never apologize — it shows weakness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are out of cranberry juice to go with the vodka I'm using to soothe the symptoms of my sinus/respiratory infection.
> 
> The Google Doc for this project is called 'argh feelings.'

The house is quiet when Stiles gets home, so he indulges in stomping upstairs to drop his bag. He makes himself veggie hot pockets from pita bread and leftover roast vegetables from the weekend, and puts a little too much cheese in them because his dad’s not home to be jealous.

Stiles sets up his homework on the table and works on it while he eats. There’s reading to do for Physics and a worksheet and the worksheet has citations, so he leaves that for last so he can look stuff up after he does the dishes and relocates to his room. Somehow looking up the citations ends up in cat videos, which really is kind of par for the course. When he surfaces from his cute-induced haze, he logs on to the library site and looks for local ghost stories in their catalog.

There’s only one book that’s local stories, but a bunch of more general ones, including some that are in the non-fiction section. He notes the section number on his phone, then starts searching Google Reader for the ones he can read online. He makes notes when things seem plausible or are corroborated in more than two sources, but doesn’t put any of the notes in the database, because he doesn’t know anything for sure yet. Supernatural hotspot as a cause for ghosts seems actually really plausible with all the werewolves and the kanima and whatever Lydia is, but if it were the only reason, they’d have been overrun by ghosts years ago, when there was still a full Hale pack running around.

Stiles is looking up murders when he sees a pale face reflected in his screen and nearly flails out of his chair. By the time he’s facing the right direction and some approximation of upright, Derek has raised the window and is sliding sinuously in. They glare at each other, and Stiles spins back to look at his computer.

“Isaac would have been fine.”

Stiles thinks about him running down the highway, looking frantic in a way he hasn’t since they got confirmation that Jackson wasn’t being hurt by the alpha pack and left willingly. He thinks about taking a beating to distract a sociopath from torturing anyone else. He thinks about Scott’s face when Peter took his mom out on a date. He thinks about fear, and voluntary apnea, and sparing superhumans from Slimer. “There’s more than one kind of fine. You’re his Alpha, he should be able to call you to bail him out when he gets freaked.”

Really unfairly muscular arms reach around to grab the arms of the computer chair, and Derek is breathing into Stiles’ ear in a way he will never, ever characterize as anything other than angry (because it’s not hot, nope, he adores Lydia and does not ever have thoughts about cranky werewolves who can smell arousal). “He could have,” Derek growls. “He called you. You’re team mom, remember? They’re all going to call you when they want coddling. That doesn’t mean you can pick fights with me in front of my betas.”

Stiles runs a tongue over his teeth, writes the title of the local ghost story book on a Post-It, and turns sharply enough that the corner of his chair smacks solidly into Derek’s chest. It probably didn’t hurt him at all, but there’s surprise on his face, which makes it deeply satisfying. Stiles hands Derek the Post-It. “The library’s open another forty minutes. I need this book. I bet secret apartments come with secret proof-of-address if you need a library card.”

Derek looks at the paper and seems to deflate, at least to less imminently homicidal levels. He nods, and climbs out the window.

Murders have drifted to animal attacks and animal population statistics and werewolf sightings in California and search frequencies of ‘werewolf’ before and after the Twilight movies came out and most of the articles that come up when he searched for ‘werewolf ghost’ that aren’t for Being Human or Scooby-Doo.

A book lands by his elbow with a thump, and his heart nearly jumps out of his chest. “It wasn’t about not trusting you. I don’t want Allison to know, and I didn’t want to be the reason you had to lie to Scott more.”

“Excellent plan. Now I’m mad at you and still have to lie to Scott. Sit your ass down and start reading, I’m not doing all the research by myself.”

Derek picks up the book and lies down on Stiles’ bed with his boots still on, because he’s a vile heathen like that. They read in silence for a while before Derek says, “Boyd says you burned the body so this ghost shouldn’t be coming back. Why are you still researching?”

“Because I don’t know why.” Stiles sits back from the computer and spins in the chair. “And because nothing’s ever simple, so it’ll probably come back or we’ll get a bunch of other ones or we’ll have pissed off an elder god or something. I want to stop being unprepared for everything.”

“Yeah, you’d be a terrible Boy Scout. You’ve only got an industrial emergency response kit in the back of your car.”

Stiles throws his pen at Derek’s head. Derek catches it, of course, without looking away from the book, and the corner of his mouth twitches.

Some of the tension drains from the room.

They get another twenty minutes of research in, and Stiles gets another half page of notes, before an email pops up from Chris Argent. He gnaws on his lip as he opens it. It’s not long. Ghosts have to be murdered magic users or called by a magic user. They’re gotten rid of by salting and burning the body, or killing the magic user who called them. There hasn’t been one in Beacon Hills in forty years, though at least one a year pops up in Southern California. Weak ones can only be seen, stronger ones can do more. The fresher the corpse, the stronger the ghost, so murdered magic users tend to make the strongest ones, and they sometimes keep their powers.

Chris also notes that the hunters, still on heightened patrol because Chris hasn’t told them that he’s a hundred percent certain that the alpha pack is gone and never coming back, saw another one to the east of town on an earlier patrol. They’d found the body, this time, too: a hunter they’d buried only a few months before.

They’d salted and burned the body, but the smoke had attracted highway patrol. They’d called in the Sheriff’s department.

Stiles sat back in his chair and huffed out a breath. “Hey, want the good news or the bad news?”

“Bad.”

“Second ghost, second body, and Chris met law enforcement next to the body.”

Derek’s quiet.

“In better news, the only way the Argents know of ghosts coming into existence are to kill a magic user or to have a magic user call one.”

“Morrell?”

“No, she left with the alpha pack. Deaton would have let us know if she was back. Can you text him to see if he’s heard about anyone new in town?”

Derek puts the book down open on his chest and digs out his phone. “We should tell your dad.”

“What, no, are you crazy? I don’t want him involved, particularly if there are crazy necromancers running around.” Stiles hands are clenched so hard on the armrests that his knuckles stand out in stark relief. He has to protect his dad from this at all costs, from werewolves and magic and people with vendettas.

“Stiles. He’s the sheriff. He’s already involved.” Derek just watches him, like this is something he should have known months ago, like he’s trying to let Stiles come to this in his own time.

Stiles’ breath hitches. He drops his head forward and tries to just breathe, because the idea of his dad in this kind of danger terrifies him. It’s bad enough when he’s just sheriff, breaking up the occasional bar fight and dealing with all of the paperwork from ‘animal attacks.’

Derek is there, in his face, and Stiles didn’t even see him move. “He’ll be able to protect himself much better if he knows what he’s protecting himself from.”

“No, I’m supposed to protect him. I’m supposed to look after him and keep him safe -”

“He’s your _dad_.” Derek grabs the back of Stiles’ neck and forces him to look up. “Look at me. Breathe. We need to tell him, because if more bodies turn up, we need to know. You can’t look through all of his casefiles, and we can’t let anyone think it’s okay to encroach on Hale territory. Telling him will make everyone safer.”

Stiles breathes hard for a moment, then looks away from Derek’s face. “Let go of my neck. I’m not a puppy.”

Derek lets go and sits on the edge of the bed, watching him.

Stiles licks his lip. “Yeah, we’ll tell him when he gets home.”

Derek nods and reaches for the book again.

“Oh, come on! At least take your stupid boots off.”

Derek rolls his eyes at him, but complies.

Pulling out his phone, Stiles sends a text to Scott.

**we’re telling my dad tonight**

He gets one back almost instantly.

**want me there to be show and tell?**

Stiles glances at Derek and considers. Derek’s control is better than Scott’s, and his dad is less likely to think it’s some kind of prank if it’s not Scott. At the same time, his dad still trusts Scott more than Stiles.

But that’s one of the things he wants to fix. So he sends:

**nah derek’s here**

and silences his phone. He adds the information from Chris to the database and searches the online newspaper archives for things that might be related to ghosts from forty years ago. That’s an annoying slog that won’t lead anywhere without more specifics, like whether it was exactly forty years ago or somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, so Stiles turns his attention to records about magic users.

Most of them are apparently only a little harder to kill than normal humans, except for the ghost risk. They’ll need to find a way to neutralize that, somehow. One website says that a ring of human virgin’s blood will neutralize all magic, and Stiles snorts derision. If that’s true, they’re going to lose their only defense against magic as soon as Stiles can find someone who wants him. Not that that’ll ever be an issue, since he’s apparently sexually oriented towards terrifyingly hot people way out of his league.

He sneaks a glance at Derek, relaxed on top of his comforter, and very carefully does not let himself want.

Derek’s nostrils flare, and Stiles has a moment of panic before he hears a car pull into the driveway.

“Your dad’s home.”

“Yeah. I guess . . . let him get settled?”

Derek gives him a look, and Stiles raises an eyebrow at him. “Or we can not wait until he’s put his gun away, if you want.”

They stay quiet as footsteps mount the stairs, and Stiles turns back to his computer, closing a few tabs he’s pretty sure will be useless. The noises from his dad’s room are quiet, and then there are soft footsteps back towards the stairs. They stop outside Stiles’ room, and his dad knocks softly. “You up, Stiles?”

Stiles swallows hard and darts a wild look at Derek. “Yeah, Dad.”

The knob turns and the door opens. “It’s a school ni- why is Derek Hale in your bedroom at midnight?”

Derek smiles, dimpling. Stiles could murder him for it. “Studying?” he offers weakly, because his first instinct is still to obfuscate, but it’s also a version of the truth.

The sheriff closes his eyes as if against pain.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. There’s some stuff I need to tell you about, and Derek’s going to help.” Stiles stands, nervous energy making it impossible to be still. “Let me grab your dinner and I’ll explain.”

He half-shoves his dad towards the stairs, and Derek pads after. His dad is looking at them both suspiciously, but sits at the table without comment when Stiles shoves him in that direction. Derek hovers in the doorway as Stiles grabs the roast veggies and pita and starts throwing together another hot pocket. The sheriff gestures for him to sit, and he obeys.

“Stiles, if this is your way of coming out, I’m going to need to go get my gun.” It’s said with a half-hearted attempt at humor that only makes it sound worse.

Stiles starts violently, nearly dropping the cheese. “No! It’s not like that.”

“What is it like, then? You’ve been lying to me for a year, now.”

The grief that wells between them has tears threatening for Stiles, and he faces the microwave as it starts counting down the minute it’ll take to heat up.

Derek interjects quietly, “How much do you know about my family, Mr. Stilinski?”

“Aside from the fire and Laura’s animal attack and Peter’s nurse kidnapping him across state lines?”

Derek nods, and some of the tension seems to go out of the sheriff’s shoulders. “I know Morgan said you were good people, and Doc Deaton worshipped the ground your mother walked on.”

The microwave dings, and Stiles pulls out the plate and puts it in front of his dad. “I’m not even sure where to start. Peter’s nurse didn’t kidnap him. He’s been healing, but he went kind of crazy for a while. Scott and I ran into him last fall. That was kind of where everything started for us.”

His dad takes a bike of the hot pocket, then puts it down and says incredulously, “With a burn patient running around in the woods?”

“Yeah. He attacked Scott -”

“He was a wheelchair user, Stiles.”

“So,” interrupts Derek, “werewolves are real.”

Both Stilinskis stop their attempts at anguished earnesty to stare at him. “My whole family are werewolves. That’s why it looked like an animal attack when Peter killed Laura. Peter also turned Scott, which is how Stiles got involved.” Derek’s eyes take on their predatory red glow as his face shifts, and his nails become claws on the table. “We look like this. Stiles has been keeping people alive.”

The sheriff slowly takes his hand from where it had flown to his gun’s habitual position.

Stiles looks at his hands. “I was working up to that part.”

The sheriff keeps his eyes on Derek as he nods slowly. “And the Whittemore boy?”

“The lizard attacks were him. And then he got better? And then he left with the alpha pack who were trying to kill us over the summer - they’re the ones who had Erica and Boyd, too, but we got them out, and there was no collateral damage, we really tried to keep everything under wraps and the Argents helped because they’ve been doing cover-ups forever and they owed us for helping them track down Gerard and for torturing Boyd and Erica when they didn’t need to.”

Stiles stops, because his father is holding up a hand and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just give me a minute. Okay. Stiles, are you still human?”

“Yes,” he answers instantly. “I turned Peter down.”

Derek’s eyebrows snap down. “Peter offered?”

Stiles nods, and glances at his dad, then explains, because it’s important that he clear up what his dad thinks of him for that night. “Yeah, after he bit Lydia and kidnapped me at the winter formal.”

“Lydia Martin is a werewolf?”

“No,” replies Derek.

Stiles says, “We’re not actually sure what she is, since she’s immune to everything. Except, apparently, mind control, since Peter had her help bring him back to life.”

“ _What?_ ”

Flailing, Stiles searches for adequate words. “It’s been a busy year!”

The sheriff drags a tired hand down his face and takes another bite of the hot pocket. “Apparently. Tomorrow, after I’ve slept, you’re going to tell me what all of your friends are and what’s been happening this year. Right now I want to know why you decided to tell me now.”

Stiles has both hands between his knees, and he’s twisting them together. “Ghosts. There’s someone new in town making ghosts, and we’re not sure who it is. But I had to burn a body this afternoon, and Chris had to burn one tonight, and we’re not going to be able to cover it up if they do this much more. And if you find them while they’re calling one - we wanted you to know what you’re up against.”

“Ghosts.”

“Witch doctors,” Derek clarifies. “Bianca Morrell trapped twenty people in a burning building as part of a territory dispute this summer, and anyone calling up the dead is going to be the same or worse. We don’t want you unarmed against that.”

“Thank you, Derek. I’d like to be alone with my son, now.”

Derek looks at Stiles, who nods, and then Derek’s gone up the stairs.

The Stilinski’s wait in silence. The sheriff finishes his hot pocket. “Isn’t he coming back down?”

“Oh - no, he’ll have gone out the window like usual.”

“Stiles, I’m not sure how I feel about you having a twenty-three year old man with a _usual_ way in and out of your bedroom.”

Stiles gapes. “It’s not like that! Sometimes there are emergencies! Or research. Scott and Erica do the same thing. I can’t believe that’s what you’re focusing on.”

His dad half-smiles. “It’s a lot easier than focusing on werewolves. How’s Chris Argent involved? Are they werewolves, too?”

“No, they’re werewolf hunters. Gives Scott and Allison a real Romeo and Juliet thing, only with more shooting and less getting married in secret.”

“Do you swear that you were lying to protect people, that you were doing what you thought was best?”

Stiles takes a deep breath and looks down at the table. “Yeah.”

His dad nods and stands and puts his plate in the sink. He rests a hand on Stiles’ shoulder. “I’m glad to have my son back. Now I’m going to sleep and in the morning we’re having breakfast and you’re going to explain more.”

Stiles bites his lip, then runs his tongue along it. “We’re going to have a pack meeting here tomorrow night. Now that you know, it’ll be way better to have it here than Derek’s lair. Less room, but we have a couch instead of an abandoned warehouse, and people keep setting his lairs on fire, so I’m pretty sure Allison would get lost trying to drive to the new one.”

The hand on his shoulder squeezes, and then his dad says, quietly, “Okay.”

His dad walks slowly upstairs, and Stiles watches him go, and it feels like one of the knots pulling him to pieces loosens, just a little bit.


	4. 7. The best way to earn a quick buck is a slip and fall lawsuit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sick anymore! This chapter would not be anywhere near as readable without AlwaysBoth, who betas like a boss and also makes pancakes. We both talk Teen Wolf on tumblr at uswe.tumblr.com.

Wednesday morning after practice, Erica greets him with, “So are you boning Derek?”

Stiles promptly trips on the linoleum- not a crack, just the floor itself, or maybe his own surprise - but flails and manages to stay ungracefully upright. “No. Why the hell would you think that?”

She makes spirit fingers at him. “Freaky girly mind-powers. Plus he only made us run two miles this morning, and he smelled like you.”

“He helped me with research last night, and then we told my dad.”

“Wow, I didn’t think you were ready to come out yet, especially with a dad who’ll take statutory as seriously as the Sheriff.”

“Oh my God, Erica.”

She grins at him, flashing too many teeth.

“Anyway, we’re having a meeting later. I’ll text everyone the details, though really you’ve all been to my house before.” He should probably work on his filter, at least try not to remind everyone of the time Derek said Scott had his own pack and, right, everyone was trying to kill each other. He’d really like everyone to be thinking about murdering each other as infrequently as possible. Never would be really great.

Her grin falls away. “You really did tell your dad.”

Stiles nods jerkily. She touches the back of his arm, hesitant and questioning, and he digs up a reassuring smile for her. “Hey, it’s all good. No more pack meetings in abandoned warehouses. We’re moving up in the world.”

The warning bell rings, and they part to go to their lockers. Scott is leaning in front of Stiles’ locker, not even trying to be subtle. All he needs to do to get out of morning practice is to smile and say he’s meeting his tutor. Finstock could not care less whether his star player practices or not as long as he keeps a C average. “So how’d it go?”

Stiles opens his locker and dumps the books he doesn’t need for his first couple classes. “Well, I’m not being shipped off to psychiatric emergency, and we’re having a pack meeting at my house tonight.”

“We’re not a p-”

“Shut up, Scott,” Stiles forestalls the usual argument. “We’re like the Justice League - everyone argues all the time and kind of hates each other, but we suit up and save the world together anyway. We need to just skip the formative years and all the Batman versus Superman and get to the awesome headquarters and actual teamwork.”

Scott gets his usual mulish expression, but they both have to get to class.

Stiles spends most of the morning putting together deliberately vague notes on identifying magic users. It’s mostly useless speculation about his dentist, because Ms Morrell had been the guidance counselor and Deaton was a vet and necromancer dentist would complete the witch doctor trifecta. Really, though, anyone that stingy with the local anesthetic has to be in league with the forces of darkness. If he went with ‘wears too much leather and has been seen at crime scenes’ as the other criteria - well, Deaton only fit that recently, and he never wore leather to the vet clinic. Did Stiles fit the magic user thing?

That . . . that was definitely something to consider. It added another salient data point, but also widened the qualifications a lot more. For one, he wasn’t conceivably Acadian at all. He hadn’t done anything particularly impressive: the mountain ash seemed like kind of the Playskool version. You really couldn’t do anything wrong with it. He’d learned about other plants, other tools, that were more focused on destruction or healing, but Deaton had insisted that Stiles put all of his practice into defense. That’s why he doesn’t want to talk to him right now: they’d had a very pointed discussion about the fact that getting attacked was Stiles best weapon, and it really, really sucked as a weapon.

Deaton ‘had faith in him,’ though, more faith than Stiles had in his own resilience. Deaton’s faith translates to a refusal to share a lot of knowledge, and Stiles kind of hates him for it right now. Stiles probably doesn’t count as a magic user at all. More a dabbler. A heavily supervised dabbler. His life sucks.

Lydia falls in beside him as he’s leaving History. “I’m sleepwalking again. You need to make it so I can’t access the database.”

Everything sucks, and will continue to suck forever. “Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll talk to Peter -”

“He’ll deny it, of course. And there’s no proof - we don’t know what made that work in the first place.”

She’s staring straight ahead down the hallway, looking like she could bowl over armies. Stiles kind of wants to give her a hug, reassure her that it’ll be okay, that they’ll turn up some evidence of what she is at some point, that they’ll find a way to protect her from losing her agency ever again. It would be a lie, though. He slips an arm around her waist and squeezes her close briefly in a bro-hug, then lets her go.

Her determined stride downgrades from ‘I will be the only person to ever successfully invade Russia’ to her normal ‘worship me, mortals,’ and Stiles deems it a success. With Jackson gone . . . no, still never going to happen. And they have to find out what the hell she even is, and stop a magic user, and get Chris Argent and Scott and Derek to all actually get along and he isn’t Scott, able to go from makeouts to murder-mode without pause, because Scott can trust his instincts, but Stiles overthinks everything unless someone is in actual danger of imminent death and so he’s just going to try to be Lydia’s friend. He - all of them - were shitty friends for keeping her in the dark for as long as they did, so he wants to make up for it by being as good a friend as he can now.

And if he still sometimes sees women’s jewelry and wants to buy it for her because she deserves shiny things and all the presents in the world, that’s his problem. Just like Scott scowling at him from his spot beside Isaac in the lunchroom is Stiles’ problem.

Stiles sets his jaw, because while Scott likes everyone teaming up just for emergencies, that’s not going to work long-term. Especially not if Stiles is Giles for everyone - completely inexperienced and terrified Giles, with a shit library but way better computer skills. He gets the greasy pizza and like three extra napkins and joins them. “So, meeting tonight at my place at eight. And I think we should invite Danny.”

“What? No! Danny doesn’t deserve this.” Scott’s ‘we are discussing important secrets’ voice is a hiss that’s way too loud, and he’s leaning over the table angrily. “None of us deserve this, but we shouldn’t drag him into it when he doesn’t have to be.”

Isaac shifts uncomfortably at ‘deserve,’ because, despite everything, his life is noticeably better now that he’s a werewolf. The people who are supposed to protect him do, and the only people hurting him are measurably bad guys. “Derek’s still got his thing about secrecy.”

Scott clenches his jaw. “He doesn’t even come into it. Danny’s safer not knowing.”

“Yeah, like you were totally safe before I told you what bit you.” Stiles hates that not sleeping means he forgets to not be an asshole.

“Well, Jackson’s gone, so it’s not like Danny has a douchebag best friend to drag him out to the woods at midnight.” Scott loses the growly look the second after he says it, and his eyes go wide.

Stiles stares at him, feeling betrayed and horribly guilty, and then he snorts laughter. “Dude, I cannot believe you’d compare me to Jackson. I have never, ever filmed myself half-naked.”

“You’re also not a murder-lizard.” Isaac has relaxed, actually gone back to eating his food instead of watching the two of them.

Stiles raises his water bottle in a salute. “Thank you, Isaac, for that ringing endorsement of my character.”

Stiles hates secrecy more than he hates the idea that Danny would want to participate. Lydia’s happy to not go on patrols, was great with sitting at home and processing information and coordinating communication when they went to rescue Erica and Boyd. His dad is, yeah, Derek is stupid and terrible and Stiles really hates when he’s right, probably in less danger now that he knows that some things take wolfsbane to go down and stay down. He’ll probably still end up too deep in this, but that’s why Stiles needs Danny, Danny who is sensible and knows how bad Jackson got even if he doesn’t know all of it. Danny who’ll help sift through police reports about ghost sightings and grave robberies and help keep Stiles’ dad inside and distracted with questions when he’s off-shift.

Lydia could help with that, maybe, but Stiles really doesn’t want to ask her anything that would be in any way an imposition on her. He’ll ask when he needs to, when someone’s safety absolutely depends on it. But his dad . . . he doesn’t need watching, not really, it’s a stupid impulse. Danny would still be an asset, though. “Besides, he might know already - there’s no telling what Jackson’s told him.”

Scott looks over his shoulder to where Stiles is pretty sure Danny is sitting, as if Scott can divine by sight what Danny knows. Stiles rolls his eyes. It might be worth talking to Derek about the secrecy thing, he can admit, though grudgingly. His whole life is werewolves and hunters and assorted supernatural bullshit, but they all seem to already know who they can talk to about this stuff.

Except for Deaton, who had only admitted that what they were doing was magic in late August, but Deaton’s amazingly cryptic even on good days. Stiles wonders if there’s some kind of secrecy-enforcing governing body, like the Watcher’s Council or some particularly freaky branch of the CIA.

Isaac changes the subject abruptly. “Peter found stuff.”

“Okay, awesome. Can you have him email it to me?” At least now he has some basis for comparison to weed out what information Peter’s feeding him is true and what’s bullshit. And Peter won’t be able to come to the meeting for obvious reasons, namely the fact that he’s going to invite Chris Argent and somehow none of the Argents know he’s alive again.

Secrets are exhausting. He’s not looking forward to dealing with the database on his own.

“I wish this was like an episode of Buffy or something, and we actually got time to do the research.”

“Yeah,” says Isaac. “But then we’d have to deal with vampires.”

Stiles points his water bottle at him. “Which are totally real, by the way.”

Scott’s eyebrows go winging towards his hairline. “Really?”

“Dude, yes. It’s totally in the Hale bestiary. The Argents have, like, no notes on them other than that arrows and sunlight are effective, but the Hales collected, like, territory information. It’s awesome. I honestly don’t know why you don’t read more of it.”

Scott shrugs. “I’m already behind on my English reading. I figure you’ll just tell me what’s up.”

Stiles sits back and smiles. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that Scott’s plans suck and usually end in everyone being mad at him, or in them fleeing crime scenes. Stiles spends the rest of lunch telling them about vampires, because they’re far away and not nearly as worrying as having to identify and locate a magic user before they decide that making corpses is easier than finding them.

The rest of the day zooms past, the way it always did when he had something he didn’t want to deal with coming up. When the last bell rings, Stiles doesn’t hurry to the parking lot as usual, because getting stuck in the inevitable traffic jam is actually super okay with him. He gets in the Jeep and waits another couple minutes for the parking lot to empty more, and then drives to the animal clinic at just under the speed limit.

He parks in back next to Deaton’s car: it’s where he usually parks when he’s here for lessons or to drag injured werewolves through the back door. How sad is it that he has a usual parking spot for injuries? At least after the reluctant alliance to bring down Gerard had been more formalized it was only for injuries from alphas and not wolfsbane bullets. Stiles takes a deep breath before getting himself out of the Jeep, because he does not want to go anywhere near Deaton right now. He wants to find a reliable teacher who doesn’t think that ‘learn to get hit better’ is his best training option.

The key is still in the box by the dumpster, so Stiles lets himself in amongst the cat and dog kibble. It sounds like Deaton’s with a client as well as a patient - explaining something about a booster in a few months - so Stiles just sits on a bag to wait. Deaton lets them back to the front with instructions to make an appointment for three months out, then opens the storage room. “Hello, Stiles.”

Stiles stands and adjusts his jacket so it’s not falling off his shoulders. “Hey. So, we’ve got ghosts. How do I identify a necromancer?”

Deaton blinks, slow and calm as always, then turns to his drawer full of object lessons. “What someone does with their abilities doesn’t change who they are, but it magnifies traits already in them.”

He doesn’t interrupt the speech, even though he’s heard parts of it before. Stare into the void and the void stares back, etc., yadda yadda, and so on. Stiles swearing he won’t turn into a crazed berserker if he learns how to magically hit things apparently means nothing.

Deaton sets a ring on the stainless steel table, like a class ring with a clear stone and a bunch of glyphs etched around it rather than a high school name. Stiles doesn’t touch it, because sometimes touching the things from Deaton’s drawer makes his hands turn funny colors. “This will light up if someone supernaturally inclined is near it.”

“Why isn’t it lighting up now, then?”

Deaton gives a small smile, the kind he uses when Stiles has asked the right question. “It needs to be on someone’s hand to work - you are the spark that powers it.”

Stiles reaches for it hesitantly. “Can I put it on, then?”

“Go ahead. It’s yours. I’ll let you know if someone comes in here or I hear anything, but I’ve been around you and Scott long enough to know that trouble will probably find you.”

Stiles looks at him sharply, because trouble finding him is why he needs to know how to fight it, but Deaton just smiles. “The ring will probably light up around some of your friends, too, but that effect should fade as it gets to know them. I’m going to go get my next patient now, and I’ll be in the exam room if you need anything.”

“I’m just going to go, I think.” Stiles grabs the ring and slips it on, thinking about how he wants to find the necromancer and how it will help him do it. He thinks about it very hard, because Deaton hadn’t specified whether it needs him or his intentions to be a spark. The ring flares peach, fading as Deaton closes the door and proceeds to the front of the clinic. Stiles would have to add colors to the database for what various people made the ring turn.

This had been surprisingly easy, and left Stiles with plenty of time to do homework before the meeting. His dad is scheduled to finish at six, and so should be home by eight at the latest, and Scott and Isaac and Boyd and Erica had been in the cafeteria at lunch. Had he told Lydia? She could be counted on to tell Allison. No, he hadn’t told Lydia, or Allison, which meant that Chris didn’t know, either. Stiles sat in the Jeep and texted them, and then Derek for good measure because the rest of them might have thought he’d already arranged it with Derek. Deaton, of course, was back to pulling his ‘I am a veterinarian’ thing and being all detached and not coming along for the ride. It would be annoying if it weren’t so reassuring to know they’d always have a base to fall back to that was well-stocked with medical supplies.

Stiles runs a hand over his head and drives home. He has the Herblock essay to get out of the way as much as possible, and Physics, and the rest of his homework, and then he needs to bake the low-sodium turkey pot pie that’s in the freezer.

Stiles leaves the house dead quiet, because he can’t think to do homework if there’s music going. He makes it through most of his homework before the Adderall wears off enough that he’s suddenly starving. He preheats the oven and makes himself microwave popcorn to save himself from starvation while it cooks.

His dad is home surprisingly right on time, shortly before the timer is set to go off, and Stiles pounds down the stairs to say hello. He stops abruptly and salutes when he finds that his dad isn’t alone: he’s with Chris Argent. “Uh, yo.”

Chris smiles and nods a greeting at him. “Stiles.”

“What’s in the oven?”

“Oh, Dad, that’s dinner, it’ll be ready in like five minutes. Are you staying?”

His dad shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it by the door. “Chris came by to make an official statement about finding that burning body in the woods, and we started talking about how law enforcement can use all the help it can get these days.”

Chris’s smile is all sharp edges, and it’s terrifying in a way nothing really should be when you’ve faced down an Alpha werewolf. “We got on the topic of what a dangerous world it is for you kids.”

“You didn’t need to do this - I invited you to the meeting later.”

“Stiles,” says his dad exasperatedly. “We’re allowed adult time before my house gets invaded by teenagers. And I need to write you a note so that you can carry a handgun in the Jeep.” He disappears into the kitchen to rummage in the junk drawer.

Stiles can feel his mouth fall open, but he’s helpless to do anything about it. Chris shifts his messenger bag forward and extracts a Sig and hands it to Stiles, and Stiles automatically takes it and checks the safety. He has a gun. He has a gun in his hand, and he’s apparently going to get to carry it.

Chris is watching him. “I have two clips for you, too, and a lock box. Allison’s bringing bullets for both of you, since I don’t usually keep those on me.”

His dad comes back with a note and says with grim good humour, “At least you waited until you were sixteen to get mixed up in this. It’d be illegal to give you this if you weren’t.”

“More or less illegal than werewolves?” Stiles retorts without thinking.

His dad smiles. Chris Argent looks at him hard. Stiles takes the note from his dad and reads it as Chris follows his dad back into the kitchen. The note reads:

_I hereby give my son, Stiles Stilinski, permission to carry both a Sig 1911 and live ammunition with him at all times except where otherwise forbidden._

It’s dated and signed and his dad is trusting him to make responsible decisions with guns. It’s been months since they even went to the shooting range together. Months in which he got his dad fired and was nearly killed a bunch of times. He carries the gun into the kitchen and puts it down on the table and stares at his dad as he opens a beer for Chris, casual as if they’re here for football night or something. “Son, I’d like you to keep it locked in the vehicle except when absolutely necessary.”

“Of course, Dad.”

The timer on the oven goes off, and Stiles dishes up dinner while his dad grabs cutlery. The gun stays on the corner of the table, and Stiles swears it’s staring at him. He hasn’t been nervous around firearms before: his dad instilled him with a healthy respect for them, but they’ve always been tools. This, though, this is his, and he’s probably going to have to use it to punch holes in werewolves. At least he has a way of defending himself now.

When dinner’s done, Stiles’ dad clears the plates while Chris digs the lock box, key, and magazines out of his messenger bag. Stiles adds the key to his key ring, and is kind of tempted to take all of it out to the Jeep, except there’s no point because Allison’s going to be bringing him ammo anyway. Derek’s just going to have to deal with any unintended flashbacks to nearly getting his arm sawed off.

Chris buckles his bag again and asks, perfectly casual, “So is Peter Hale coming to the meeting tonight?”

Stiles whips around in his chair, nearly falling from it, to stare at his dad. “Dad!”

His dad shrugs. “I didn’t know it was a secret.”

Stiles should never talk to anyone ever again. He takes out his phone and sends to Derek

**bring Peter. Argent knows**

and shoves his phone back in his pocket. “Well, he’s coming now.”

Chris raises an eyebrow, and really why does everyone do that to him? “You don’t need to wait to hear from your alpha?”

“Still human, Chris, still don’t have an alpha. And you’re not allowed to shoot Peter - we’ve already killed him once, and you know that every single one of them deserved it. Even Kate.”

His dad, up to his wrists in dishes and soapy water, wonders aloud, “How did I not notice when your life became a telenovela?”

Stiles smiles weakly and slouches in his chair. Brakes squeal in the driveway and Stiles’ new ring flashes sickly-purple then amber then pure clear red. It stays red. Stiles stares at it, perturbed and wondering if he should dive for the eggplant-shaped salt shaker. Derek bursts in, chest heaving under his leather jacket, Isaac and Peter flanking him, and demands, “Stiles? Are you okay?”

“Knocking,” Stiles says slowly, “is becoming a lost art.”

Derek glares at the gun on the table. “What’s going on?”

“You’re Peter Hale?” his dad asks.

Peter nods. “In the flesh.”

“I just asked you to bring him because Chris knows now, so there’s no need to keep him away from planning sessions anymore,” Stiles says. The ring is fading slowly.

“This is why you should write longer texts,” Derek growls.

“Stiles tells me I can’t kill you again for your crimes,” Chris says. He’s still sitting at the table, smile in place, and how on Earth did Scott stand dinners there when he and Allison were dating?

Peter smiles, too, but his has fewer teeth. “I’d hoped that double jeopardy would apply.”

The sheriff sighs. “I should probably figure out the paperwork for ‘finding’ you, since in the real world you’re still a missing person.”

Derek and Peter both nod gratitude. Isaac is still lurking in the hall. Stiles sighs. “Come on into the living room. We were done dinner anyway.”

It’s nearly half an hour before anyone else is due, but they all proceed to the living room and sit on the available surfaces and stare at each other. Isaac takes a seat on the floor, probably to be below the eye-level awkwardness. Stiles is on the brink of launching into a ramble - about something, anything - when Derek asks, “Why was there a gun on the table?”

“It’s mine.”

Derek scowls at Stiles. “You don’t need a gun.”

The sheriff clears his throat. “So, Derek, I never heard where you’re working these days.”

Derek wrenches his glare from Stiles and looks at the sheriff, then down. “I’m not.”

“Getting your entire well-insured family murdered is a profitable exercise,” Peter contributes in a helpful tone.

Derek almost seems to shrink. The silence is oppressively awkward.

“So!” starts Stiles. “Between the bestiaries from you guys and the notes I’m making as things keep trying to kill us and what Deaton says, I think I now have the most comprehensive database on supernatural creatures on the West Coast. How cool is that? I should totally set up a website and charge people to access it, even if it’s just whackjob Supernatural enthusiasts. And it’s great that I have the two of yours, because I can cross-check. Not that one is more accurate than the other - no, you agree, of course, because objective reality and observation and stuff - but the Argent one, the more recent entries are all ‘this is how you find it, this is how you kill it’ but the old stuff and the Hale bestiary have, like, details on how these things come to be and what will draw something to an area, which is really cool because I think I figured out how to harpy-proof Beacon Hills so we don’t necessarily ever even need to kill them because they just won’t be an issue -”

Someone knocks on the door.

“Oh, thank God.” Stiles bolts to answer it, because even if it’s the necromancer here to kill them all, at least that’ll end the awkwardness. His ring lights up green, and falls back to clear as he draws the door open on Allison and Lydia. That’s interesting. Gross sick color is obviously Peter, then, and then maybe magic eye color correlations? That doesn’t explain the peachy color around Deaton, though, unless he has some kind of magical-girl transformation scene where he turns into a super-vet with peach eyes and a short skirt. Which - not a really good look for him, at least not in Stiles’ head.

Allison waves at him, just a quick movement with her elbow tucked in tight and her hand by her face. She seems embarrassed.

“Are you going to invite us in, loser?” Lydia looks bored, like she might take off at any time for a better party.

“Er, yeah, of course, come on in. Everyone’s in the living room.”

Lydia flounces past him, and Allison hands him one of the boxes she’s carrying. “Dad said to bring these for you and your dad. What’s going on?”

Stiles looks at the image of wolfsbane burned into the top of the box and swallows. “Sorry, I’d like to only do this once. I don’t want to miss any details. Scott and Erica and Boyd should be here soon, though. Come on in.”

He gestures her in and closes the door. At the end of the hall, Lydia is standing stock still in the doorway to the living room. “Who invited the zombie?”

“Lydia, it’s fine, I swear.”

Derek’s nostrils flare. “Wolfsbane?”

“No one’s shooting at you, Derek. Chris had Allison bring them for me and my dad so that we’re not actually completely helpless if the alpha pack comes back or we get more feral omegas or any of the other horrible things that tend to happen all the time.”

Derek crosses his arms and glowers. “You won’t need -”

“It’s not about needing,” Stiles snaps. “It’s about having something in place in case of emergencies. I’m really hoping that this” - he waves the box around - “is a lifetime supply and that nothing exciting ever happens again, but my dad decided that I get to be prepared, and I’m really happy about that.”

“Explain the zombie,” Lydia demands.

“Is it always like this?” the sheriff asks Isaac.

Isaac nods, a half-smile on his face, and Peter smiles at Lydia. “I was invited. Can I just say that you look lovely this evening?”

“No,” snap Stiles, Lydia, and Derek in unison.

“Look,” says Stiles, “I’m just going to take all of this stuff out to the Jeep and put it away. I think everyone knows everyone except Allison, this is Peter, Peter, keep your stupid mouth shut. Everyone try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”

Stiles retreats to the kitchen and puts the box of ammunition in the lock box, the two magazines next to it. The gun goes on top, the note above that, and he closes and locks it. It should fit under the driver’s seat. He takes it out to the Jeep and takes his time making sure that it fits and he can drag it out quickly if he needs to. He could probably load one of the magazines and leave it there for easy accessibility, but ghosts don’t react to bullets and with the alphas gone there’s no current werewolf threat. He can totally leave it and wait. If something’s down to his quick reflexes everyone is dead anyway, so it’s not that big a deal.

Scott rides up on his bike, looking like he’s come straight from work. The ring lights up amber again. It’s totally going to be awesome as a werewolf-detector. If it lights up while he’s alone in his room he can totally do the super-villain slow-turn in his chair to say hello to whoever’s slipped in. It’ll be great, and totally freak out Scott, who will not be prepared for Stiles having some kind of counter for werewolf stealth.

“Hey! Everyone else showed up early, so now we’re just waiting for Boyd and Erica.”

“Everyone, like -” Scott looks up at the house almost longingly.

“Yes, Allison’s in there. No, she didn’t bring her boyfriend. But Peter Hale and Chris Argent are still deciding whether they want to kill each other, so I’m waiting out here for the last of our guests.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Nope!”

Scott flops down onto the steps. “Allison’s boyfriend smells like a douchebag.”

Stiles leans back against the Jeep and nods. “Totally a douchebag. She’ll get tired of him soon.”

The fact that he’d seemed perfectly decent, if boring, is completely irrelevant to the bro-moment they’re having. They hang out in silence until Erica pulls up to the curb, Boyd in the passenger seat. She hops out, the most dangerous thing to have ever driven a station wagon.

Stiles jerks his head at the house. “Come on, they’re all waiting.”

“I’m not even late,” Erica complains.

“Yeah, well, everyone else was just desperate for my company.”

They troop into the house, where the tension in the living room is like a live thing, dense and coiling.

Stiles claps his hands together once, sharply, to get everyone’s attention. “Great! Now that we’re all here, we can talk about the ghost problem. So, abbreviated version since most of you know this already: you get ghosts when someone calls them or when you kill a magic user. You get rid of ghosts by salting and burning the bones. We’ve had two ghosts in the last couple days, both from bodies that weren’t buried in the cemetery. We want to identify them and contain them before they start making corpses instead of desecrating them. Obviously we want to avoid killing them, because they’d be a strong ghost and apparently that can sometimes mean violent effects.

“Contain them like you’d contain anything else that isn’t a werewolf - handcuffs are great, rope is great, duct tape is great. Unconscious is even better, because I have no idea what they can do other than raising the dead. Identification’s a little trickier, since we have no idea what they look like. Obviously, if you see someone doing something creepy with a dead body, it’s probably them, but keep an eye out for people who smell funny or are just generally off. Most of you have awesome instincts, like noticing that Matt was a total creeper last spring. I also got a present from Doc Deaton.” Stiles showed off his ring. “This will light up in the presence of supernatural people and things, so -”

The sheriff’s phone rings, and Stiles falls silent, because it might be important.

“Stilinski.”

The werewolves in the room all get tenser, and Isaac goes a little wide-eyed.

“I’ll be there in ten.” The sheriff hangs up and looks around the room. “There’s been a break-in at the morgue.”


	5. 6. Avoid Tweeting any photos of your private parts.

The meeting doesn’t so much break down as move out, with the sheriff going to his cruiser and Chris moving the SUV so he wasn’t blocking him in, then driving off.  
  
Stiles looks at Scott, who says, “I think I’m going to go visit my mom at work. Maybe hang around a bunch.” He lopes out of the room, and Stiles knows he’ll report anything he overhears as well as acting as protective detail. He’ll watch out for the sheriff as well as his mom, which is great. Stiles hasn’t brought up the idea of more supernatural protection than just wolfsbane with his dad, because he knows his dad will never take a teenage bodyguard, even one with superpowers.  
  
He surveys the people left in his living room. “How hard is it to track a dead body?”  
  
Derek shifts against the wall. “If it’s been in the morgue very long, hard. The chill masks scents.”  
  
Stiles takes a deep breath. “Okay, so we want to go out fast, to the kind of places they could do this in peace. Somewhere it’s unlikely for people to go, but probably not super-far from the hospital since as far as we know they didn’t move the bodies before. They might need to bury the body after, but I’m not sure. They’ll at least want it somewhere it’s likely to be undisturbed, since they have to know by now that we’re finding them and setting them on fire. Uh, teams of two, at least one werewolf, fanning out in cardinal directions, unless anyone has a better idea?”  
  
Derek stands away from the wall. “Boyd and Peter, go east, take the Camaro, Erica and Lydia, north, Isaac and Allison, west. Text if you find anything or run into trouble.”  
  
Lydia tosses her hair. “Fine. Erica, let’s go.”  
  
Derek tosses Boyd the keys.  
  
Everyone troops out, leaving Derek and Stiles alone in his living room. “You think they went south?”  
  
“Offices for rent a few blocks from the hospital. They’ve been empty for months.”  
  
Stiles nods, doesn’t ask how Derek knows, because he’s looked up everything he can on the Hales and knows that Peter is nearly as obsessed with buying things as he was with biting them. “Okay, let’s go.”  
  
He grabs his keys and jacket and waves Derek out the door ahead of him so he can lock up. Derek is following Boyd with his eyes as he pulls out of the driveway in the Camaro, not quite glaring, but watchful. Stiles rolls his eyes. “Dude, he’s not going to wreck your car.”  
  
Derek glares at him, and Stiles hops in the Jeep and leans over to unlock the passenger door, trying to remember the last time he had a human in his passenger seat. It’s been a while. Some days it seems like the only humans he knows are his dad and the Argents, and that’s just kind of sad.  
  
They get going, driving just at the speed limit. Stiles digs out his phone and tosses it at Derek. “Here, text Chris. We have a better chance of finding them, but I don’t think we want any of the hunters mistaking us for the targets.”  
  
Derek does that obnoxious eyebrow thing - really, though, everything he does with his eyebrows is obnoxious, his entire face is obnoxious - and says, “You really think he’ll call off his dogs?”  
  
“Did you get the dog metaphors from him or is it just a comparison? You know what, I don’t actually want to know. So what’s the plan if they’re actually there? You going to flirt them into submission? Because I’ve gotta say, the rending and tearing thing is probably not our best option.”  
  
Derek’s jaw twitches, but his fingers are obediently flying over the phone. He hands it back, and Stiles shoves it blindly in the pocket of his hoodie. “Fine. Do you have mountain ash?”  
  
“Yeah, but I don’t know if it’ll work. We didn’t cover anything but werewolves, since that was, y’know, pressing.”  
  
“It worked on the kanima. Besides, don’t you just have to believe?”  
  
Stiles makes a frustrated noise. They pass the hospital, cruisers in front of it, and keep going south.  
  
“Left at the intersection,” Derek says, and Stiles pulls sharp into the other lane because no, of course he doesn’t get adequate warning, that’d be too easy. As he turns left, the ring flares black.  
  
“Shit, we’re close.”  
  
Derek tenses next to him. They pass an apartment complex, and then there’s the office suite, and one of the doors is hanging open like a broken tooth.  
  
A motorcycle zooms out of the parking lot, rider anonymous and androgynous in black leathers. Stiles’ finger nearly aches, and he’s paralyzed for a moment before he swings the Jeep hard to go after them. Derek swings the wheel back, and they skid into the parking lot at an angle.  
  
“What the fuck was that for? They’re getting away!”  
  
Derek unbuckles his seatbelt and yanks the door open. “I’ll follow. Deal with the ghost.”  
  
And yeah, that makes sense, dammit. Derek doesn’t even close the door; he’s off and running faster than anyone should be able.  
  
Stiles pulls into a parking spot and gets his mountain ash from the trunk and contemplates getting his gun, but it’ll be no use against something with no body. He locks the Jeep and follows the trail of broken glass and scuff marks into the building. There’s an elevator with a bloody fingerprint on the button for the third floor, and that’s way, way too easy. He takes a picture and sends it out to his contact groups for Derek’s pack and Scott’s pack, which means Isaac will get it twice and Allison won’t get it at all, but at least they’ll know how to find him.  
  
The doors open, and there’s a clear trail of something Stiles doesn’t want to think about too hard on the floor leading down the short hall to another door that hangs open.  
  
This feels like a trap, but the ring doesn’t light up. No ring means no danger, probably, but Stiles still approaches the door cautiously.  
  
Nothing happens when he pushes it farther open to get a better look at the offices. Nothing except oh, there’s a body on the floor, chalk around it and cuts on her chest and stomach. Stiles surveys everything else, listens with weak human senses just in case it wasn’t the necromancer on the motorcycle. It’s quiet and nothing’s moving. He edges in, and nothing moves.  
  
He swallows, and takes a step closer to the body. Nothing moves, nothing changes, not even a hint of a cold breeze.  
  
Stiles takes out his phone and turns on the flash and takes a picture of the body, because he thinks the cuts form words, but he can’t read them in the dark.  
  
He’s staring at his phone, at ‘c u at jungle’ carved in a woman’s torso, when the room flashes bright again and - yep, wow, why is this his thing? - he’s slammed into the wall. He doesn’t resist, because he never resists, because that would hurt more and make them feel justified throwing him around. There’s also nothing to fight back against, because the only other occupant of the room is lying on the floor.  
  
Mist rises from the body, white and thick and coiling. It fills a shape like smoke in a jar, if the jar was shaped like a really angry woman in a party dress. Stiles scrabbles at the wall, wanting to get away, before he remembers himself. There’s no getting away, because they’ll have to call the police and that means his dad, and he’s not letting this thing get to his dad.  
  
“Hey there,” he says, and the pressure holding him to the wall gets sharper.  
  
The ghost cocks her head to the side. “What are you doing here?”  
  
Stiles licks his lips. “Came to, ah, see how you were doing.”  
  
She snarls, her face twisting inhuman and hard, and Stiles is dragged out from the wall. He misses the days when he only lost control of his body to gravity, not to everyone who wanted to push him around. They were good days.  
  
Stiles relaxes into the drag, lets the fear come to the fore. The sharp gross taste of fear is as familiar as his mom’s chicken soup used to be. Cold bony fingers press into his shoulders, then through, through and in and they’re cold, so fucking cold, that Stiles nearly drops the bag of mountain ash.  
  
The pain doesn’t matter, can’t matter, and Stiles stretches his arm out in a half-circle despite the way it makes his shoulders scream as the tissue and bone tries to occupy the same space as ghost fingers.  
  
She hisses in his face, “You’re all the same. It doesn’t matter that I’m broken, you just wanted to see tits.”  
  
“Really, really not why I’m here.” Stiles wraps his arms around the dead space her torso would occupy if it were real and not shuddering in and out of view, passes the mountain ash to his other hand. Finally half-way, and he could cry from relief. Relief or pain, whichever seemed manlier. The ghost hasn’t noticed yet, is too busy staring at Stiles’ face like she’s planning the butcher cuts.  
  
She drags her fingers down his torso, and they pass through his shirts without tearing but he can feel them on the inside, icy pain that reaches too deep. She gets in his face farther, predatory and sexual in a mad dead way. “Yeah? Why are you here, then?”  
  
Stiles closes the circle, and it’s the sloppiest circle he’s ever made, but he knows it’s whole, knows it in his bones. Now he just needs to convince her. “Look down. See that? That’s a circle of mountain ash. It contains magical creatures, so now you’re trapped in here with me and can’t hurt anyone else. We’re going to burn your body and exorcise you and end you, and you’re stuck in this circle with me and can’t do anything about it.”  
  
She shrieks in rage, dissolves partly to smoke that races around the inside of the circle and holy shit it’s working, she’s contained. Stiles sags a little in relief, and starts to step out of the circle, because wow does he want to be anywhere but here, but then the smoke is snapping back and she looks more solid than she had before, dress gaining texture in addition to shape.  
  
She shoves a hand forward and in and grabs his ribs. “You little bastard. You think you’re going anywhere? This hurts.”  
  
She smiles, and wow that’s a lot of teeth and they look far more needle-like than they should. “This hurts, and I am all about sharing.”  
  
Something squeezes, cold and brutal.  
  
Stiles really wants this to stop.  
  
Derek bursts in, red-eyed and clawed, and skids to a stop.  
  
“Burn the body,” Stiles chokes out.  
  
“Boyd called. They’re on their way.” Derek prowls to the edge of the mountain ash, growls when it pushes away his attempt to reach for Stiles. He hasn’t even looked at the body.  
  
The dead cold hands in him feather upwards. “You want to kill me, you sick son of a bitch? I wonder -”  
  
It’s like breathing in a freezer, only worse and different because the cold in his lungs is his actual lungs, not cold air or chill breeze but dead hands. Stiles curves forward, crumpling around the pain. At least the ghost is contained, can’t hurt anyone else. Plus, bonus, he can’t feel any tell-tale trickle of blood. Just pain, lots of pain, and the ghost is whispering in his ear, “Do you think if I squeezed your heart hard enough I could make you die?”  
  
Stiles’ focus narrows and tightens. Everything outside the circle is Derek’s problem. This is his. He just has to live, just has to deal with this, until the body is gone. It’s really nice to have an end in sight, even if it isn’t, exactly, in sight yet.  
  
He licks his lips. He’s practically talking to her shoulder. “I think if you did you’d regret it. Right now, you’re the victim. The person who called you up as a ghost is the one who did something bad. They did wrong, they did the only wrong here, and they hurt you and we’re trying to stop them. We don’t want anyone else to get hurt, and you don’t want anyone to get hurt, either, right? You don’t like this, you don’t want anyone else to go through this, right? We can help with that, we’re going to deal with this, we don’t mean any disrespect, we’re just trying to help. All we want to do is help people, that’s all, and I was only looking because I wanted to see what they did to your body, what they’d carved into it, because it’s not okay. None of this is okay. But if you kill me, if you stop my heart, you stop being the victim. You’d be killing one of the only people who can stop this happening to someone else, and you’d be making some of my werewolf buddies pretty unhappy, too. So I don’t think you want to do this. I think you want to leave my heart beating. I think you’re a good person who just had something shitty happen to them, and you want to stay a good person. Who doesn’t want to be a good person?”  
  
She shoves her fingers deeper into his lungs and he gasps and can’t keep talking. “Whoever did this gave me life again after I made one stupid decision and ended things. I’m really kind of okay with this.”  
  
Stiles is fucked.  
  
There’s a smash in the hall, and the pain and cold flicker absent, just for a moment. He looks around, notes the wood flooring that’s been pulled up and piled around the body like a pyre. Boyd flies in, takes in the scene with one sweeping glance, and rips the top off the box of salt he’s carrying. Peter isn’t far behind, and he has a jerry can.  
  
Stiles could cry. He really could, especially when the hands re-form and squeeze. “Make them stop.”  
  
“Could you guys maybe go a little faster?” It occurs to him, then, that he’s asking Hales to start fires in buildings. He’s asking Derek, who came through fire broken and alone, and Peter, who came out mad the first time and dead the second, to set a fire in a building that has people in it.  
  
He wishes Boyd could do all this alone, that he knew Boyd could do it alone before the ghost kills Stiles. He doesn’t, though, so he doesn’t say anything. It’d be really hard, anyway, because ghost fists constrict his breathing more than a panic attack, especially with the way she keeps squeezing. Her eyes are on his face, and she’s smiling, and wow this is not okay at all.  
  
“Stiles,” says Boyd, “I’m not sure it’ll burn.”  
  
The last body they’d burned had been way more decomposed: drier, with more bone showing and less meat to char. Boyd has a point. But surety, surety is something Stiles can provide. He can believe in things with a whole lot more conviction, these days.  
  
He looks the ghost in the eyes, in her washed-out greyscaled eyes. “She will.”  
  
“Peter, Boyd, get out.”  
  
That must mean that the preparation’s done. There’s a pause. Boyd says, “Here, hurricane matches.”  
  
There are footsteps, and the strike of a match. Flames flare blue, are echoed in the depths of the ghost’s eyes. She snarls wordlessly.  
  
Derek doesn’t leave. He should really leave, because he hates fire, and the smell of a burning corpse must be awful. “Get out, you idiot.”  
  
The growl in his voice means he must be wolfed out. “Not until it’s over.”  
  
The smell of burning corpse is awful even with a human nose and the distraction of immense pain. She rips her hand out of his chest and punches him in the face instead. It doesn’t connect the way it should, ice passing through instead of stopping. That doesn’t make it hurt less, especially since he can’t drop away from the punch because of her hold in his chest. He has to feel the follow-through, the way her arm is through him almost up to the elbow, the way she pulls out slowly.  
  
The room is getting warmer.  
  
Finally, finally, the ghost goes up in flames.  
  
Stiles scuffs the line of mountain ash, because there’s no way to know, and stumbles for the door. Derek is right there, grabbing his arm and tugging him to the stairs. Stiles starts down, but Derek just kind of scoops him up in what would be a hug if it weren’t immediately followed by jumping down a flight of stairs. He does it again, and again, and then they’re stumbling into the open air.  
  
Stiles leans over and coughs, a combination of reaction to pain and smoke inhalation. He realizes belatedly that he’s shaking, and it’s stupid. He’s fine, everyone’s fine.  
  
“Give me your keys.” Derek is holding out his hand in a demand.  
  
Stiles just looks at him, because no one drives his baby. Derek raises his eyebrows at him, and Stiles huffs a sigh. Derek’s stupid eyebrows are right: he’s in no shape to drive. Stiles shoves his keys into Derek’s hand harder than necessary and looks around the parking lot. Boyd and Peter are both hovering by the Camaro, looking torn between checking that they’re okay and getting the hell out of there.  
  
Derek jerks his head at them. “Go. I’ll text later.”  
  
Stiles stumbles for the Jeep and gets in the passenger seat. It’s weird. He hasn’t been a passenger here since - “Are you bleeding anywhere else?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Your nose,” Derek says.  
  
Stiles touches the back of his hand to his upper lip, and it comes away dark and wet. “Oh. No. I should call my dad. The fire will probably spread.”  
  
He extracts his phone as Derek puts the Jeep in gear and sets out, taking them a route that won’t go in front of the hospital. “Stilinski,” his dad says after the first ring.  
  
“Dad. The body’s at the office building on third and Johnson, and it’s on fire. The necromancer got away.”  
  
“Son -”  
  
“Sorry about this, but I swear we’re all away from the crime scene. There’s probably not even that much evidence that we were there.” Just his fingerprint in the elevator and against the wall, and any prints Derek and Boyd and Peter left. Yeah, they’re kind of screwed. He wonders how averse his dad would be to having a werewolf or four break into the crime lab.  
  
His dad sighs and hangs up. He’s probably surrounded by other officers. At least now someone will go check the offices, get the fire put out before it torches the rest of the building. Stiles swipes his tongue along his upper lip, collecting the blood that had slowly dripped there. He makes a face at the taste. The picture on his phone is the next item of business. He angles it to show to Derek. “I don’t know if you saw.”  
  
“I saw.”  
  
He licks his lip again, because his nose hasn’t stopped bleeding and he doesn’t have any tissues. “We can’t ignore it. We should go.”  
  
Derek nods. “Not tonight. They can’t expect us this soon.”  
  
Stiles sends the picture out to Allison and Lydia and all of the werewolves, with Field Trip Tomorrow as the title. “Yeah. And, not that I don’t appreciate the save, but weren’t you going to follow them?”  
  
“Trail disappeared. Completely.” His hands tighten on the steering wheel.  
  
Stiles resists the urge to rub a hand over his chest where it still feels cold and bruised. “Should we ask Deaton?”  
  
“Didn’t he give you his shiny detection toy?”  
  
“I guess that’s an answer. I’ll get better at this.” He doesn’t know why he’s telling Derek, because Derek sucks at being an alpha at least as much as Stiles sucks at being the resident magic user.  
  
Derek pulls into the driveway, and Stiles stumbles out and into the house. He wants a tissue and to inspect himself in private to see if the ghost left marks. Derek follows, and Stiles waves vaguely at the living room. “I’m going to take a shower. You can keep yourself occupied.”  
  
He trudges up the stairs and into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. If someone needs to get in, it won’t stop them, but he wants to announce loud and clear that he wants privacy right now. He peels off his hoodie and his shirt and his Tshirt, dropping them all on the lid of the toilet. There’s not a mark on him.  
  
His nose is still dripping sludgily, but Stiles grabs toilet paper and shoves hanks up each nostril to stem the flow until it clots. He pokes at his collarbone, at his ribs, but there’s no surface tenderness that’ll pop up as bruising later. That . . . that works for him. He doesn’t need any more bruises in the locker room that make him look like even more of a klutz.  
  
He’s still cold, though, cold to the bone, and he smells like smoke, so he takes the tissues out gingerly so as to not dislodge any clots and gets in the shower with the water hot as he can stand.  
  
When he’s done, he wraps himself in a towel and goes to his room to dress in ratty warm sweatpants and a Tshirt. He puts the damp towel and his dirty clothes in the hamper and gets his laptop and goes back downstairs to join Derek in his living room.  
  
Derek’s frowning at his phone. “Isn’t Jungle where we cornered the kanima?”  
  
“Yeah, the time with Danny, not the time with the rave.”  
  
Derek nods. “Do you have a fake ID?”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“My dad’s the Sheriff!”  
  
“And?”  
  
“Of course I have a fake ID.”  
  
“Good.” Derek flicks through the menu on the TV as Stiles boots up his laptop.  
  
“It’s not even 9. My dad should be done with the scene by midnight. You don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to, because I’m just going to be doing more research. No idea what he’s going to do about fingerprints at the crime scene, because it was obviously us. I’ll see if Chris -”  
  
Derek interrupts, “It’s taken care of.”  
  
Stiles looks at him incredulously.  
  
“Argent has the crime lab.”  
  
“That’s both terrifying and convenient.” Stiles starts looking up Jungle, checking for floor plans and upcoming events and whether it’s on some kind of ancient curse site.  
  
Derek is still flipping through channels and Stiles has found out more than he ever wanted to know about the 70s gay scene in Beacon Hills when the Sheriff comes in. “Hey, Dad, it’s only ten, how’d you get away so fast?”  
  
“Fire department’s on hand, and I’ve got deputies there. Now, you boys want to tell me why you couldn’t move the body so that I wasn’t dealing with an arson case I damn well don’t want to solve?”  
  
Stiles winces, because even if Argents mean he won’t be a felon, unsolved cases don’t look good for elections.  
  
“If we’d taken the time, it would have killed Stiles,” Derek says, still watching the TV.  
  
The Sheriff pauses, then runs a hand down his face and looks impossibly tired.


	6. 5. Schedule nightly appointment with Dr. Johnnie Walker.

Stiles stays up researching for a while after his dad goes to bed. Eventually he remembers to restrict Lydia in the database, to make her only able to access those things Peter is allowed to know. Then he changes his password, and gets back to researching. For a long time, actually, until he shifts position and notices that Derek is still there. “Don’t you have an apartment to go home to?”  
  
Derek doesn’t look at him. “Don’t you have to be at school in seven hours?”  
  
“Huh? Yeah. What’s that got to do with it?”  
  
“Sleep?” He sounds incredulous.  
  
“Fine, you leave, I’ll sleep.”  
  
Derek’s face gets angrier, and Stiles glares at him and thinks back to the good old days when he wanted him dead. Derek turns off the TV and stalks out, and Stiles shakes his head and shuts his computer and locks the door. He heads upstairs and considers popping a melatonin, because he’s still kind of achy and on edge even if no bruises took, but he’d still be dopey all during his first couple classes, so it’s not worth it.  
  
He flops down on his bed and closes his eyes and his stomach roils with the night. He ignores it, though, because Stiles has gotten good at ignoring things that don’t matter. It’s still early September, and still warm, but he rolls himself completely in his blankets before he sleeps.  
  
In the morning he gets to school early, for the ‘optional’ practice Danny has instituted where they run a lot and get sweaty and freshmen try desperately to prove that they aren’t going to trip over their own feet. It makes Thursdays suck, because it’s the only day there’s practice before and after school.  
  
Practice is gross and hard, but running for his life has paid off in that Stiles isn’t as winded as a lot of other members of the team by the time practice is over and they’re hitting the showers.  
  
The morning drags, but then at lunch everyone sits together. They don’t, usually, because it’s tempting to talk pack business, and they really shouldn’t at school. Allison even ditches her boyfriend, and she and Scott sit across from Stiles with Lydia as a buffer. All of the werewolves have found some excuse to touch him this morning, and he’s pretty sure it’s to reassure themselves that he’s okay. So it’s not really a surprise when Erica drapes herself over his shoulder, because she hadn’t stalked him outside his practice and they didn’t have any classes together in the morning. It’s not a surprise, but it still sends a jolt through him as he suddenly has to stare very carefully ahead and not look at her at all, because from this angle he could probably see all the way to her belly button.  
  
“Hi, Erica.”  
  
She slides into the seat next to him and says, “So we’re having another meeting at your house tonight, right?”  
  
“Yeah, after practice and before we head out.”  
  
Allison twiddles her fork. “Should I tell my dad?”  
  
“No, this is mostly about tracking, and I think it’d be suspicious if he came along.” Stiles took a moment of silence to appreciate the idea of Chris Argent at Jungle. The two just didn’t go together. For one, Jungle was fun.  
  
“So what’s Jungle?” asks Boyd, and that’s . . . actually not unexpected, because Boyd’s pretty quiet and studious and very straight.  
  
“Gay club,” explains Scott, trying to do his low-pitched ‘I’m a werewolf of the world and very experienced and jaded’ voice.  
  
Boyd just blinks, and Stiles thinks of what Ginger would think of him. “We should get you a feather boa.”  
  
Isaac grins. Boyd arches an eyebrow. “No.”  
  
“Do you even have fake IDs?” Lydia asks, like it’s completely out of the question.  
  
“Yeah,” say Stiles and Scott at the same time as Isaac and Boyd and Erica and Allison say, “No.”  
  
They look at Scott and Stiles incredulously. “What?” asks Scott, shifting uncomfortably. “Stiles got them for my birthday last year.”  
  
Lydia looks impressed for a moment and sits back. “Well, it’s just a matter of getting the rest of you in, then.”  
  
Isaac flashes teeth at her. “It won’t be a problem.”  
  
“We can figure it out at my house after practice,” Stiles says, kind of repressively. He doesn’t want to talk about this in the cafeteria where anyone could overhear them. He also doesn’t want to make concrete plans without Derek there, because he doesn’t want Derek to think he’s being shut out of planning or that Stiles is trying to recruit his betas away into Scott’s pack. Everything would be much easier if Scott would just join up with Derek. Scott’s pack is basically Stiles and Lydia and Isaac half the time, and Stiles has some conflicting loyalties based on Derek’s obscene hotness, willingness to die and/or kill for them, and slightly better planning skills. So Scott’s pack basically sucks except for Lydia, and he can see why Lydia would really not want to be involved with any pack with Peter in it, but Stiles is totally down for helping to kill Peter again if it means everyone can just be one big happy pack who doesn’t get twitchy about territory.  
  
“So, uh, how was practice this morning?” asks Scott.  
  
“You’d know if you showed up,” says Boyd.  
  
“Yeah, seriously, dude. Danny’s going to rip your head off if you don’t start coming to practices, no matter how much Coach loves you.” Danny’s promotion to team captain after Jackson fucked off hadn’t been any kind of surprise, because Danny is awesome. His general laid-back awesomeness also means he’s extremely unlikely to even shout at Scott, but he’ll do his disappointed face like he did that one time Greenberg scored in their own net, and Danny’s disappointed face is just as lethal as beheading.  
  
“I’ll come today,” says Scott. “I swear.”  
  
“Didn’t need to know that,” quips Erica, and Stiles slants a grin at her.  
  
Lunch is almost relaxing, after that, and the bell rings too soon.  
  
Scott comes to practice, as promised. Coach shouts nonsense at them and puts them through their paces. No one wolfs out, Derek’s not visibly lurking in the woods. It’s almost normal.  
  
Well, the old version of normal. The new normal involves giving Isaac and Boyd a ride to his house as well as Scott, and finding Derek and Erica and Peter already waiting inside. “Does breaking and entering mean nothing to you people?”  
  
“No,” says Derek.  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes. “Right, of course not. So, even though they escaped last night, do you think you can identify our perp by scent?”  
  
Derek and Peter nod.  
  
“Maybe?” says Boyd, and his face is scrunched up in consideration.  
  
“Okay, so that’s four of us who can probably track this person. Scott, if you can come, too, it’d be good to have you at my back.”  
  
“I’m coming, too,” says Isaac.  
  
Stiles nods. “Okay, uh -”  
  
“Did you read the notes I sent you about stopping them, Stiles?”  
  
Stiles hates Peter. He really does. Especially when Peter’s sounding reasonable. “No. But tonight we’re just going to try to contain them, ID them, and maybe drive them out of town. Pretty sure we won’t need to do anything else, and if we do I’ve done the research.”  
  
Derek looks at Stiles like he’s an idiot. Which he is, he totally is. He should have at least looked at that email, but the research he’s done is ugly, and he hasn’t wanted to see it the way Peter would lay it out.  
  
The doorbell rings. Stiles starts, but Scott reassures him, “It’s Allison and Lydia.”  
  
Stiles let’s them in, saluting awkwardly to Lydia as she breezes past him holding bags from Macy’s.  
  
Scott asks, sounding kind of strangled, “Are you coming with us tonight?”  
  
“Of course not. Danny says they don’t even make a good Cosmo. I’m here to dress Stiles.”  
  
“Uh.”  
  
Erica grins wickedly. “Ooh, can I watch?”  
  
“I’m fine!”  
  
Everyone stares at him judgingly except for Scott and Allison, who are making tortured faces at each other.  
  
Stiles groans in defeat. “Fine. I guess we’ll meet there at 9?”  
  
Peter makes a sceptical face. “That’s really early.”  
  
Derek rolls his eyes. “Which would be an issue if we were going there for fun and not to hunt down a necromancer. Isaac, stay here, you’ll be Stiles’ shadow. Boyd and Peter, get inside and try to find them. Keep your cells on you, and send photos if you smell them. Erica, you’ll be conspicuous.”  
  
“No, she won’t,” corrects Lydia, cutting the tags off a pair of jeans that look too tight for anyone in the room. “Gay guys have female friends who sometimes like dancing, or, hell, if she and Allison felt like making out a little, that’s an option, too. I’m not going because Jackson nearly murdered Danny there last year, and because Danny would wonder why I was there with you losers and not him, not because it’s some boys-only club.” She throws the pants at Stiles. “Go put these on.”  
  
Stiles fumbles them and nearly drops them and nearly decides to drop them. “Really?”  
  
“You’d be conspicuous in your usual clothes.”  
  
Stiles stares at Lydia and tries to be nostalgic for the time before she knew who he was. On the one hand, no painful humiliation like this was sure to be. On the other hand, she actually talked to him now. And it probably wasn’t fair to balk, since Derek had stripped to bribe Danny and then flirted with the officer on duty at the desk - he really just kind of uses his looks as a blunt instrument. That’s actually really sad. Erica does it, too, now, which is probably Derek’s fault. And now Lydia wants to dress him in ridiculously tight pants so that werewolves who use their sexuality like other people would use a tire iron can laugh at him. It’s going to be a great evening whether or not there’s any attempted murder. “Fine. I’ll wear whatever you want, but I’m not going to change until we have to leave, because I still have to do my homework and make dinner, and that doesn’t actually need a big gay makeover.”  
  
Allison and Scott are still staring around each other, not making eye contact but trying to absorb every glimpse they could get of each other. If it gets any more 90210 in his living room, Stiles is going to go get his shiny new gun and shoot himself.  
  
“Oh,” says Scott. “I guess I should go home, then. But I don’t have a ride.”  
  
Everyone in the room but the lovestruck couple rolls their eyes and Allison offers, hesitantly, “We could give you a ride.”  
  
Boyd stands and says, “Right, let’s all go, then.”  
  
“Isaac, you stay here. Everyone else, we’ll get you in.” Derek moves out, Erica and Boyd and Peter following.  
  
Stiles looks at Isaac and thinks about worst-case scenarios and loyalties and really hopes they can drive the necromancer out of town or threaten them into harmlessness. “So, uh, wanna work on that problem set for Pre-Calc?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Stiles shoves the jeans back in the Macy’s bag, and there’s a shirt in there, too. He doesn’t want to look at it right now, so he shoves it to the side and unpacks his homework, spreading out over the coffee table. They settle in to work on it, and the other homework they have in common, and then each do their own work until it’s done. Isaac seems surprised by something, and keeps glancing at Stiles.  
  
Eventually, Stiles stops clicking his pen and looks at him. “What is it?”  
  
Isaac shakes his head. “I just didn’t expect you to be so . . . studious, I guess. I thought you were more effortless brilliance and the seat of your pants.”  
  
Stiles shakes his head, vaguely insulted: he is brilliant, goddammit. “Have to do my homework before the Adderall wears off or it doesn’t get done.”  
  
Isaac hesitates, then says, “The bite would probably fix it, you know.”  
  
“I know.” Stiles doesn’t want to explain, because Isaac’s been seriously horning in on best friend time, but Isaac’s one of his, now. So he won’t explain all of it, not how sometimes it feels like he’s going to vibrate out of it’s skin and he’d give almost anything to be rid of it, or how sometimes when he needs to follow like eight streams of thought he can and it’s like being Batman. “But Lydia’s immune to everything including most magic, and Allison’s better as DPS than support. Allison’s going to be better offensively almost no matter what, because, seriously, she’d probably be nationally ranked or something if national rankings used superpowered assholes as targets and not things that stand still. Deaton’s willing to help, but he doesn’t want to be all, like, embroiled in pack business, which means you’d all still probably get magically screwed, and not in the fun way.”  
  
Stiles doesn’t mention, either, that he’s pretty sure Allison would hesitate before helping Derek, which could get him killed, or that Deaton’s code of ethics is rigid enough that it might get them killed, too. As awesome as superpowers sometimes seem, they’re not worth giving up this piece of usefulness he’s found. Stiles just finishes his homework and starts dinner, adding extra whole wheat spaghetti noodles for Isaac.  
  
He texts his dad that he won’t be by, and to not eat anything too unhealthy. There’s a jar of spaghetti sauce in the cupboard, and he should probably add zucchini to it for extra veggies, but whatever. They eat, and he makes Isaac do the dishes while he dries them and puts them away. It’s only 7:30, so Stiles pauses: not enough time to watch a movie, way too early to get ready. “Hey, Isaac, do you play Rift?”  
  
“Isn’t that like WoW?”  
  
“Yeah, except the lore is way cooler. C’mon upstairs, I’ll show you.”  
  
They dick around on Rift for an hour, and Stiles thinks he may have convinced Isaac to set up an account, and then it’s time to get ready to go. Stiles would complain more about being the only one given a makeover, but Isaac is all predatory lean muscle in a tight Tshirt and a leather jacket and Stiles is apparently the only person in the pack who doesn’t dress club-appropriate by default.  
  
Stiles takes the Macy’s bag into the bathroom and pulls on the jeans, and they just fit - sort of, barely. They’re tight enough that he doesn’t know if his wallet will fit, and that’s just plain worrying. No wallet means no mountain ash or matchbox or flashlight, either. And how the hell had Lydia known what size to get?  
  
He fishes his fake ID out from where it’s hidden behind his photo of his mom and shoves it in his back pocket, along with his debit card. The shirt, when he pulls it out, is more deeply veed than anything he’s ever owned, and, yep, fits way too close. Stiles looks at himself in the mirror, and he looks like the most stereotypical twink in the universe. It’s great. It’s awesome. He really hopes he doesn’t see Danny.  
  
“Right, we’re going to go now. But I’m warning you, Isaac, if you say anything at all, I will feed you to a dragon.” Stiles bundles up the clothes he’d been wearing and stomps back to his room and dumps them on the bed. He glares at Isaac.  
  
Isaac looks at him, but wisely doesn’t say anything. They get in the Jeep and drive to Jungle. There’s no line, this early, so they just approach the bouncer. Stiles tries not to look too hopeful, tries to look like he does this all the time. His ring flashes green.  
  
The bouncer surveys them, and his eyes seem to linger on the ring that’s fading fast to clear. He sighs, and doesn’t ask for their IDs, and pulls the rope aside. “Don’t make trouble.”  
  
Stiles stares at him in disbelief, and to memorize his face. “Yes, sir, definitely.”  
  
They descend the stairs into Jungle, and Isaac leans close to ask, “What the hell was that about?”  
  
“I have no idea, but he’s not human.”  
  
Stiles can practically feel the ripple of tension and violence that goes through Isaac. “He smelled human, though. Should I take care of him?”  
  
“What? No. I think he’s what Lydia is. We just need to talk to him once we’ve got this shit sorted.”  
  
It gets too loud to continue the conversation, because even though the dance floor is nearly empty, the DJ is blasting music.  
  
Stiles leads Isaac to the bar and he orders a soda, because of course he’s here for work and can’t afford to be drunk. His life is kind of pathetic. He spots Peter on the floor, and Derek lurking in a corner, and he thinks maybe Erica on the far side. Scott shows up a few minutes later, looking kind of adorably lost.  
  
After two sodas for him and a soda and two drinks that had arrived courtesy of other people for Isaac, Stiles is tired of waiting. The ring has only lit up at all as the werewolves came in, and stayed quiescent otherwise. They’re staking out the bar, and there are other werewolves all along the periphery, but this isn’t telling them anything about the crowd. It is a crowd, now, or at least starting to become one. Ginger comes in, trailing glitter, and that’s as good an excuse as any.  
  
He grabs Isaac by the arm and drags him over, checking his ring as he cuts through swathes of people. It stays human-clear as he approaches Ginger and hugs her, and that’s a total relief because he is not ready for another friend to be all Dark Side.  
  
Ginger envelops him in a perfumed hug, and he grins at her. She drags a wide-eyed Isaac in, too, and asks, “Who’s this?”  
  
“He’s here to keep me out of trouble.”  
  
Ginger laughs and runs a manicured finger down his chest. “Looks like he has his work cut out for him tonight.”  
  
It’s a rush, a boost of confidence. He’s never going to tell Lydia. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”  
  
“Well, leave your keeper here and come dance with me.”  
  
Stiles complies happily, both because dancing with Ginger will be fun and because it’ll get him into the writhing mass of bodies on the floor, where he’ll be better able to approach their necromancer. Dancing with Ginger is a lot less sexual than almost all of the rest of the dancing going on, and Stiles knows it’s because he’s been quasi-adopted, which is pretty awesome.  
  
Someone grabs his ass, and he twitches, and Ginger raises an eyebrow at him in an inquiry as to whether he’s okay and an offer of defense. Stiles shakes his head slightly, because as mildly invasive as getting groped is, it’s nothing next to his usual mayhem. It’s heartwarming, though, to have someone watching his back. Or at least someone who’s not a werewolf.  
  
They keep dancing, and Stiles starts sweating through his shirt. It’s kind of gross, or it would be, if he weren’t already torn between having a blast and hypervigilant near-panic. He doesn’t have room for gross in his head. The ring stays clear through three songs, five songs, eight songs, and he could use some water.  
  
The lights flicker.  
  
The ring flares darkly.  
  
Stiles whips his head around, and spots Derek shoving open an Employees Only door. He breaks away from Ginger and streaks after him, elbowing everyone in the way.  
  
He bursts through the door into a stairwell in time to hear clanging above him, and races up the stairs. It’s not a tall building, but three stories of stairs still leave him winded as he opens the door onto the roof. A woman is dancing away from Derek, all black hair and black leather, and Derek is frozen in place. Maybe literally frozen - that’s not one of his usual looming or intimidating poses, it looks more like he was caught mid-motion.  
  
The woman launches herself off the edge of the building, and Derek jerks forward, snarling and shifting. They both run to the edge of the building and look down, but there’s nothing visible on the pavement and nothing on the side of the building.  
  
Stiles turns to look at Derek. “Are you okay?”  
  
“I don’t know what she did to me.” His eyes are red, though no other part of him is wolfed out.  
  
“What did she say?”  
  
Derek’s fists clench. “That we’d make good guard dogs when she was done with us, and that she’d see us tomorrow.”  
  
Stiles rocks back on his heels and shoves his hands as far into his pockets as they’ll go. “Well, shit.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Them being targeted specifically is worrying, because what does she want? ‘Guard dogs’ boded ill, because so far as he’d read, supernatural creatures didn’t normally come back as ghosts, they just went away. If she can do that, and paralyze Derek on the roof, she's playing with some serious mojo. She isn’t going to be scared off. That just leaves the other option, and the other option is terrifying.


	7. 4. Take some wheat grass, soy paste and carob, toss it in the garbage and cook yourself a big piece of pork.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter does have an incident of self-harm: no one's in emotional or psychological extremes, and it's for a practical purpose, so I'm not tagging for it, but if it'll bug you, use your browser's search tool to skip from 'badass' to 'Scott moves quickly.'
> 
> This chapter also contains discussion of ethics, which is right up there with medical accuracy on my list of favorite things.

Stiles gives up on sleep when he hears his dad get up. He rolls out of bed and nearly trips over his pants from the night before, then kicks them under the bed. He’s never wearing them again: they barely have pockets at all.  
  
He interrupts his dad shaving, and props himself in the doorway all faux-nonchalant. “Hey, O father of mine. How’s it going?”  
  
“Stiles.”  
  
He folds his arms and tries to re-settle himself in the doorway. “So, uh, want to go out for breakfast, since we’re both up early and everything?”  
  
“For pancakes?”  
  
“Bacon, even,” Stiles offers, to tempt his dad further.  
  
His dad puts down his razor. “What’s wrong?”  
  
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I have an ethical dilemma, and I could use your advice.”  
  
“Okay, what is it?”  
  
Stiles flicks his tongue out over his lip. “You might want coffee first.”  
  
His dad looks at him in the mirror and assesses for a moment and then nods. “Fifteen minutes, then.”  
  
Stiles nods, then goes and gets dressed. He can afford to skip a shower, since he’d showered when he got home from Jungle, to wash off the glitter and sweat and fear. He throws on comfy jeans and a couple shirts and a blazer and puts his Adderall in his backpack to take after breakfast.  
  
His dad drives, and Stiles resists the urge to fiddle with the scanner. It’s not a long drive to the diner they like, but it’s a quiet one, because Stiles really doesn’t want to pull this on his dad before coffee.  
  
His dad pulls the cruiser into a parking spot and flexes his hands. Stiles thinks he’s probably bracing himself for another horrible revelation, and wishes this could be something simple. He scrubs a hand vigorously over his hair and gets out of the car. “C’mon, delicious breakfast is waiting.”  
  
They walk in, and a woman in her thirties smiles. “Just the two of you?”  
  
“Yeah, thanks, Ava.”  
  
She seats them in a booth that’s illuminated by the newly-risen sun. “You boys want coffee?”  
  
They both nod.  
  
She leaves them and comes back almost instantly with a coffee pot, because they’re the only two in the diner. His dad takes a gulp of it black while Stiles adds sugar to his.  
  
“Start talking, kid. You’re worrying me.”  
  
Stiles folds the empty sugar packets in half and starts shredding them real small. “So, we’re pretty sure we can find the person who’s been causing trouble tonight. Like, we saw her last night, but we know where she’s going to be tonight and we can probably set a trap.”  
  
His dad looks at the menu blankly. “I don’t suppose this story ends with handing her over for breaking into the morgue?”  
  
Stiles huddles into himself. “That’s one option: I take all her power away from her. I - yeah, that’s the option that might drive me and maybe everyone else crazy. And also maybe still get her killed anyway, because she wants them as guard dogs against something, which means something out there is after her, and I’d be taking away her ability to defend herself.”  
  
Ava comes back. They order, both getting mountains of pancakes with fruit and sugar. “It’ll just be a few minutes for that.”  
  
“Okay, thanks.” She walks away, and his dad says, “What’s the other option?”  
  
Stiles stares at his coffee as if he can see the mysteries of the universe in the bottom. “Murder her and try to salt and burn the body before she comes back.”  
  
He can feel the weight of his dad’s gaze on him. “Stiles -”  
  
They sit in silence another few moments. It hurts. Stiles stirs his coffee.  
  
“Those are really the options on the table?”  
  
He takes a gulp of coffee. “Yeah, and since you’re in the know now, it seemed like a better idea to talk to you, since I’m mad at Deaton and Scott’s always anti-murder and Allison’s murder-happy and Derek frankly sucks at killing people and you’re, well, actually a professional at dealing with bad guys.”  
  
“You know, your mom has some family in Maine.”  
  
“Dad! This is serious!”  
  
His dad makes a tired swipe at his eyes. Ava comes back with the food. They both smile and thank her, and then sort out cutlery and syrup.  
  
Stiles cuts his pancakes into viciously precise chunks. He just wants his dad to tell him what the right thing to do is, so he’s not quite so paralyzed by feeling awful.  
  
“How likely is the first option to hurt you and your friends, son? Because if you turn her in after, it’d clear up a lot of things on my plate and she’d be somewhere safe. I’m also - taking a life is hard. It leaves marks.”  
  
Stiles says around a mouth full of pancakes, “I set Peter on fire so Derek could slice his throat.”  
  
His dad looks like he’s been gutted.  
  
Stiles is fucking this up. “No, I just - we do what we have to, okay? I want to leave her alive if we can, because yeah, obviously, killing bad, justice and survival for everyone. But it’s not going to traumatize me forever if that’s what we have to do.”  
  
“You sure you don’t want to move to Maine, get away from all this?” His dad’s breakfast is nearly untouched, even the bacon.  
  
Stiles can’t answer that, won’t answer that. He’d love to forget all the weird shit and awful shit, but it’d mean losing a bunch of people, and he’s not okay with that. The werewolves and Lydia and Allison and his dad are his entire world. “If it’s just me, pretty likely to hurt. Like, Dark Willow hurt, with the crazy and the destroying things and abrupt change in fashion sense. But them being what they are? It can diffuse it, it looks like. It looks like maybe that’s actually a pretty normal setup? But it’d be a sudden influx, and we’re not that big, so it’d really depend on Derek.”  
  
If it ends up being more than Stiles can deal with on his own, letting the overflow go to Scott isn’t an option. He’s a beta, and independent from a pack, and it’s more likely to hurt him than it is to hurt Derek and the leather triplets. Stiles won’t risk him, even if it’ll piss Scott off for Stiles to be tied to a pack that isn’t him.  
  
His dad picks up a strip of bacon and looks at it as if it’s responsible for all his worldly woes. He takes a bite, then puts the rest back down. “Jesus, Stiles.”  
  
Stiles gnaws on his fork. “Yeah, I know. Sorry.”  
  
His dad takes another sip of coffee and looks Stiles in the eye. He’s steady, with his cop-face on. “You know your own limits better than I do, and I think you can assess your friends, too.” He takes a deep breath. “One of the things I tell my deputies is that you have to look out for yourself first. If you get injured or taken out, you can’t help anyone else. Helping other people, upholding the law, that’s the goal, always, but we need to make sure that we’re going to be able to continue to do so. That’s why we have bullet-proof vests and back-up just a radio away, so that we’ll have the tools we need to do our jobs safely.”  
  
Stiles nods and lets out a whoosh of breath. “Okay. I’ll - I’ll let you know what happens. I might not be home tonight, though.”  
  
“Scott’s?”  
  
If he’s being honest now about the big stuff, he doesn’t need the petty lies. “No.”  
  
“Text me so I know you’re safe.”  
  
“Yeah.” Stiles stares at his pancakes. His dad has just condoned him committing murder if he can’t manage the other option. He needs to make sure it’s not necessary, needs to be able to deliver her to his dad, even if the lock-up has already proven minimal protection against supernatural bullshit.  
  
Stiles shovels more pancakes into his mouth as his dad drinks coffee and pokes at his half-heartedly. “If I’d known all this would make you take eating healthy seriously, I’d have told you last fall.”  
  
His dad laughs. “Nice try, son.”  
  
They finish breakfast more or less in silence, their conversation too heavy for followup. His dad pays and they rise to leave, and his dad grabs him in a side-armed hug. “I wish this was easier on you.”  
  
“Me, too.”  
  
His dad drops him off at school, with the reassurance that Stiles will get a ride home from a friend.  
  
Scott’s staking out his locker again, and so’s Erica. They’re glaring at each other. “Really, guys?”  
  
Scott whirls on him. “I can’t believe you’re seriously considering killing someone! In what world is that okay? We don’t even know if she’s killed anyone, and even then that wouldn’t bring anyone back!”  
  
Stiles rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “The other option’s bad, too, Scott.”  
  
“Nothing’s as bad as killing people,” Scott says adamantly.  
  
Erica tosses her hair and leans into him cleavage-first. “I don’t know, Scott, I think it’s kind of fun.”  
  
Scott growls, “Back off, Erica.”  
  
Stiles reaches between them to open his locker, forcing them apart with his body. Erica snarls almost inaudibly at him. Stiles rolls his eyes, because she’s long past hitting him with car parts, and he’s not scared of her anymore. Well, okay, only a little bit.  
  
He grabs the relevant books from his locker, then slams it closed again. “I need a ride home after school, if either of you have a car today.”  
  
“Yeah, I’ve got the station wagon,” Erica volunteers quickly.  
  
Scott shoots her a dirty look.  
  
The bell rings. “Great, Erica. I’ll meet you in the parking lot after school.”  
  
Stiles spends most of the morning mentally reviewing his notes. Circle for containment is simple, seems simple, and he’s got that down solid. Deaton had a book of symbols that made various things easier, and he’d shown Stiles one that made it so that two people could work together, sharing energy. He’d coached Stiles through using it boost Scott’s ability to ease a cat’s pain after neutering. Stiles is pretty sure he can repurpose it. It seems a fairly straightforward change.  
  
The biggest issue is what to use for the circle. Mountain ash works on supernatural things, but a necromancer isn’t precisely supernatural in nature, even if she does supernatural things. Salt worked on the bodies, so it might work on the origin of that magic. There’s also the virgin’s blood option, which isn’t super appealing, but might be worth trying. Stiles wishes he had the option of a bunch of trial runs, but this has to work, or it might blow up in their faces and one dead person is the best case scenario.  
  
The Winchesters have it easy, because they can just use spray paint or salt for everything. Stiles could use a bit of everything? That might work. It’d be a matter of mixing it thoroughly so that the whole circle had some of everything. He could ask Deaton what would work, but this is far, far away from defensive, and Deaton will not approve.  
  
His notes for the morning are more disjointed than usual. When History lets out for lunch and Lydia falls into step with him, he just - he just can’t. She’s the best, she’s fantastic, but she’s a walking mind game and he might die tonight. She can’t know the plan, either, because Peter can’t know the plan. Last time Peter was around magic, it was resurrecting himself, and he might try to use tonight to grab power. So Stiles had texted Derek and come up with the plan, and then texted Boyd and Erica and Isaac.  
  
“Look, I can’t do Allison’s birthday. The people I invited to your party are literally the only people I know who can get a party going. My other go-to for fun is playing video games with Scott. You’re the one who knows, like, how to set stuff up. Can’t you do it?”  
  
Lydia smiles at him, all lip gloss and perfect hair. “Of course. All you had to do was ask.”  
  
Stiles stops dead, because what the hell. “What the hell?”  
  
She rolls her eyes and grabs his arm. “You’re taking too much of all of this on yourself. Allison’s birthday was meant to be a direct lesson in it being okay to ask for help.”  
  
Stiles shakes his head. She has no idea, can’t have any idea, that he’s dealing with the asking for help thing already. “Unbelievable.”  
  
He’d be mad at her, but, well, it’s Lydia.  
  
Actually, yeah, it’s Lydia. He wishes her broken nails and split ends for making his life harder than it has to be.  
  
He sits with Scott and Isaac at lunch. They talk about lacrosse and English class and movies they want to see. After lunch, he texts Scott.  
  
 **don’t talk about this out loud, but do you want to help me set up a trap for her?**  
  
There’s a pause, because Scott never has his phone. At the start of his second-to-last class his phone vibrates, though.  
  
 **not to kill her right??**  
  
 **srsly no. i just need you to watch my back.**  
  
 **where & what time?**  
  
Stiles bites his lip. He’s got a back-up supply of mountain ash in the Jeep, but he wants more. Plus he needs to pick up more salt - like, way more salt. And a knife. And a bucket to mix everything in. Maybe just a garbage bag: he can do a shake ‘n bake thing, and then cut a hole in the bottom to leave a crumb trail.  
  
 **4:30 at the bottom of the fire escape for Jungle. bring lots of mountain ash.**  
  
There’s no reply, so Stiles is just . . . going to hope but not depend. He manages to half pay attention to the rest of the afternoon. Erica is waiting in the parking lot, leaning back against the side of her car. A few people look at her longingly as they pass, but none approach: she’s seen too often in company with Boyd and Isaac.  
  
“Hey!”  
  
“Get in.”  
  
Stiles throws his backpack in the back and does up his seatbelt. Erica gets in and joins the mess of traffic leaving the parking lot.  
  
Erica taps her fingers on the steering wheel nervously. “Are you sure this’ll work?”  
  
“If she doesn’t murder anyone first or get the drop on us, yeah.”  
  
She makes a face.  
  
“Look, Derek’ll make sure it’s fine. And even if we have to kill her, the Argents and my dad will help cover it up.”  
  
She shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “I don’t want to kill anyone. Even with the alpha pack - it was our fault and we did it, but I didn’t have to rip anyone’s throat out.”  
  
Stiles knows he’s the only person outside the pack who gets to see her like this, and it’s only because he’s seen her tied up and tortured twice and never thought less of her for either time. She stops at the curb in front of his house, but leaves the engine running. “See you at nine, right?”  
  
“Yeah. Thanks, Erica.”  
  
He grabs his bag and leaves her there in the car. In his room, he drops his backpack and digs out the baggie of mountain ash he keeps there and adds the smaller bag he keeps in his pocket. If he’s going to be using a crazy uber-mix, he needs everything he’s using to be the same. The symbol he needs is burned in his brain, but he double-checks his pocket for the paper he has it copied on. Next, he grabs a seldom-used duffel from the closet and puts the mountain ash in, then the first aid kit from the bathroom. With a garbage bag, a knife, and the box of salt from the kitchen, he’s ready to head out again.  
  
He dumps the bag in the back of the Jeep and stares at it for a minute, stomach roiling. This sucks. Everything sucks. Tonight is going to suck no matter what happens. Contemplative staring is a little too much like being really still, and it makes him jittery, so Stiles gets in and starts driving. First stop is the gas station, to fill his tank and the jerry can. They’ve got a barbecue display set up, which reminds him to grab firestarter, too.  
  
The salt - well, it’s a good thing it’s a big enough town that he doesn’t actually recognize the cashier, but he makes sure to babble about a science project anyway. Nearly time to bleed for the cause again. He parks half a block away from Jungle, because there’s being inconspicuous and then there’s carrying a bunch of stuff.  
  
He lugs the bag with him to the alley behind the club, where the fire escape dangles out of human reach. It’s 4:25. If Scott isn’t here in fifteen minutes, he’s going to . . . fuck, call Derek or something. Derek is going to make some awful disappointed face about it, even if he won’t say anything.  
  
Stiles huffs a breath and humps the bag higher onto his shoulder.  
  
Scott races up on his bike, backpack on his back, standing up and pedaling hard enough that the bike is shifting violently back and forth. “I made it!”  
  
Stiles smirks at him. “You’re even almost on time.”  
  
“What do you need me to do?”  
  
Stiles nods at the fire escape. “I need to get to the roof.”  
  
Grinning, Scott says, “Werewolf superpowers to the rescue?”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
Scott jumps from a flat-footed start to grab the bottom of the fire escape, and pulls it down with the weight of his body. Stiles tosses him the duffel bag and starts climbing. He knows it’s probably making a lot of noise inside, but there shouldn’t be too many people inside at this time of day. Hopefully.  
  
They make the roof without anyone leaning out and shouting at them, and Stiles takes his duffel back from Scott and starts setting up. “Did you get more mountain ash?”  
  
“Oh, yeah.” Scott takes off his backpack and draws two big bags out of it. “What are you even doing?”  
  
“Containment circle. It’s going to be badass.” He takes out the trash bag and dumps his smaller bags in it, and one of the bags Scott hands him. Then, since salt is probably better to add when the liquid content is unlikely to make it clump, he gets out the knife.  
  
“Stiles?” Scott asks, alarmed.  
  
“Virgin’s blood. Mean’s magic can’t get past it. Plus, since it’s mine, it’ll help me stay in control of what goes on in the circle.” Stiles sheds his outer layers until he’s just in a Tshirt, and reassures himself that the first aid kit is close to hand. He takes a deep breath and holds his arm over the bag. He should take it to his shoulder, since that’s the most easily hidden, but that won’t give him control over where the blood falls. He settles on cutting high on his forearm, and raises the knife. He slices it across his arm, and it doesn’t hurt at first, because the blade is sharp. Blood wells up, and pain with it, and Stiles hisses his breath out through his teeth.  
  
Scott watches, a worried look on his face. “So, if it just needs to be virgin’s blood, does that mean -”  
  
“That we’re almost guaranteed evil witches who want to carve my heart out? Yeah. I should get Derek to de-virginize me for the greater good.” Stiles watches the drip of his own blood, the steady flow meaning he at least got a vein and not an artery. He should probably be perturbed that Scott will be able to tell that he’s not joking, but it’s Scott. He’s not going to tell anyone.  
  
“Dude! No, I meant that once you and whoever - does that mean we’ll be defenseless if we have to do this stuff again?”  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes and gestures at the first aid kit. “I’m done, you wanna bandage me up? Thanks for rubbing in that I’m the last virgin we know. It makes bleeding for the cause so much more rewarding. And I’m just really hoping we never need to bleed all over stuff to save our asses again.”  
  
Scott moves quickly, grabbing a sterile dressing and ripping it open and clamping down hard on Stiles’ arm. He grabs a second one a moment later and adds it. Stiles lets Scott do his thing, because Scott’s the one who deals with injured animals, so he presumably knows what he’s doing and will give Stiles his arm back when he’s allowed to use it again.  
  
Scott tapes the dressings in place and lets his arm go. “So what next?”  
  
Stiles grabs the top of the bag and holds it closed as he lifts it and shakes it. “Mix well, serve with a side of necromancer. I’m just going to try to mix this before I add the salt, make sure everything’s really mixed.”  
  
His arm twinges, but he just shakes the bag more vigorously. He needs to get moving, though, because she’s probably going to need to set stuff up, too, and he doesn’t want to try the whole showdown thing ahead of schedule. He puts the bag back down and grabs a box of salt, rips the top off, and dumps it in. Rinse and repeat until the bag is three quarters full. He closes it and knots the top and rolls it around so the ash and blood and salt all mix. Stiles rights it and opens it and it looks reasonably blended. He reaches an arm in to stir and take a look, just to be sure, then fills the bag destined for his pants.  
  
“Okay.” He ties the top of the bag again and picks it up to lug it over to the side of the roof by the access door. He wants the gap he’ll have to close later to complete the circle to be as close as possible to where he’ll come out.  
  
Scott looks like he wants to help, but refrains from offering because this is mountain ash and he can’t work with it.  
  
Stiles rips a hole in the bag and starts the circle a couple feet from the door, because there’s no sense in leaving it open as a retreat. He takes it immediately to the surrounding wall, where it’ll be less noticeable and also shielded from rain. He keeps his pace slow, letting the line trickle out bold and solid.  
  
The dizzy buzz that usually accompanies magic is worse than usual, which Stiles takes as a good sign, a sign that this is not only super-awesome but going to be really effective. He stops just inches short of joining the circle, because he’s out of his mix. He dumps the bag back in his duffel with the knife and grabs the sharpie from his pocket.Taking a deep breath, he kneels and starts drawing on the tiles of the roof. Every stroke of the pen feels so right that it’s almost disconcerting. Finally, he’s done, and he compares it to the one in his pocket. It’s perfect.  
  
“Right, let’s get out of here.”  
  
They do, and they go back to Stiles’ house to play video games. Homework is for Sundays, or at least for when his blood isn’t buzzing under his skin.  
  
Only a few more hours to go.


	8. 3. Try not to die.

Jungle is more crowded than it was the previous night. Scott and Isaac and Boyd all stick close to Stiles, glaring at anyone who comes too close. It’s brutally conspicuous, but Stiles doesn’t say anything. He’d rather they not be too far away when things start to happen, so she can’t get any of them alone. Peter and Derek and Erica are lurking somewhere, and they’re all just waiting for their cue.  
  
Reflexively, Stiles touches the pocket with the bag of mountain ash. He’s not sure whether he wants this to be over soon or to put it off as long as possible. Either way, the waiting part sucks.  
  
He chews on the straw for his soda and taps his foot in time for the music. He’d bought it for himself, just like the last one. No one even looks at him twice. Boyd and Scott have both had drinks bought for them, and Isaac’s had three, and it’s completely unfair. He’s just done with this whole night. Yeah, okay, he wants this over. Pretty much immediately. He can’t afford to doubt or second guess, because that would wreck everything, but second guessing and contingency plans are like a scab he can’t stop picking. Stiles wants to be moving, wants to be doing, wants this to be over one way or another. But all he can do is wait.  
  
The lights flicker.  
  
Stiles can feel something like electric current on his skin.  
  
The lights flicker again, and the sound system goes down.  
  
Stiles’ ring turns black.  
  
He shifts his shoulders to loosen up. “Showtime.”  
  
Derek is already racing for the door to the stairs, even though they haven’t seen even a hint of the necromancer’s physical presence. Scott closes a hand convulsively on Stiles’ arm to hold him back and out of trouble, but then all of them run for the stairs.  
  
They keep human-slow, both so that they can keep Stiles in the middle and so that the crowd won’t notice. Stiles thinks they’re probably conspicuous anyway, a tight-jammed pack of leather heading for the stairs.  
  
Stiles shoves to the front so he can go up the stairs first. “Remember to stay out of the circle.”  
  
The roof door clangs above their heads. His arm stings with the beat of his pulse. He pushes himself to run faster, because he has no way to tell what she’ll be able to do in the time it takes them to get to the roof.  
  
He’s breathing hard by the time he hits the roof, and Isaac’s right on his heels. The tableau that greets them is far from heartening: Derek snarling, already wolfed out, Peter pressed against the far corner of the roof, growling, Erica on her knees.  
  
Erica on her knees, panting, her eyes shining and vacant. There’s chalk around her, and Stiles can only hope that his dark and unobtrusive sharpie was less noticeable, because they’re screwed if it’s gone. He hadn’t expected her to be able to work this fast.  
  
The necromancer smiles when she sees them, and Stiles gets that it’s time for the villainous monologue. “So glad you could all make it! It’ll be easier this way, you know. You’ll just be one big happy pack of guard dogs, and you’ll even get to keep the same territory.”  
  
Stiles starts talking, because the rest of them should be as invisible as possible. They need to be out of the way of magic until they’re absolutely sure magic won’t work anymore. “You know it’s not even a good territory, right? Our bowling alley sucks, and we’ve only got one movie theatre, and there are only three bars besides Jungle.”  
  
She cackles. “Because human interest is the only reason to move somewhere. You know what Beacon Hills has? It has soil that remembers being cohesive territory for over a hundred years. It has ley lines and a thin veil to the faerie courts, and werewolf blood soaked in down to the bedrock. I can make myself a fortress out of this town, and all I need to do is rip your souls from your bodies.” She smiles at Erica, moves her hand, and Erica’s claws come out.  
  
Stiles takes a step forward, stepping firmly inside the circle. “You should probably start with me, then, so I can’t magic them back to normal.”  
  
“You’re full of shit,” she sneers. “The Beacon Hills pack witch is Alan Deaton, and he’s a useless pacifist veterinarian who fled L.A. because he didn’t want to deal with anything more complicated than bitches with litters.”  
  
Stiles shrugs and lifts his chin at her. “Yeah, well, looks like your info’s a little outdated.”  
  
She shrugs, too, cool and mocking. “Who am I to turn down a volunteer?”  
  
She raises her hand, and Stiles feels like he’s anchored to the rooftop. He tries to take a step forward, and only confirms that he can’t move. Then the pain hits, and it hits hard, but he manages to shout, “Erica, run!”  
  
Erica’s the last piece left, the only one who needs to leave before he can close this circle and trap them here. Boyd lurches forward and grabs her arm, dragging her backwards as fast as he can go.  
  
“Doesn’t look like anyone else minds if you go first,” the necromancer taunts.  
  
“Yeah,” says Stiles, digging in his back pocket. “I didn’t think they would.”  
  
The bag is in his hand, and he works behind his back to loosen the top.  
  
She’s pacing towards him, tossing a plain stick of white sidewalk chalk up into the air and then catching it, over and over. She stops a few feet short of him and bends to make a mark on the roof.  
  
Stiles can feel the energy she’s putting into it, and the scale of it terrifies him. But the bag is open, so he swings his arm in a wide arc, flinging the mixture therein. He knows it will land exactly where it needs to, both because he’s gauged how far away he’s standing and because he’s carrying certainty of it in his bones.  
  
The circle flares to life, and he can hear at least one of the werewolves shuffling back to a more comfortable distance.  
  
The necromancer’s face gets cold and hard. “What have you done?”  
  
“Really?” Stiles asks incredulously. “You’re sticking with cartoon villain lines?”  
  
She’s sketching more quickly, and the white chalk feels ominous.  
  
What would Peter do with access to even a fraction of this power? He’s been perfectly loyal, perfectly helpful, but the fear skitters under Stiles’ skin, because Peter is still a murderer whose entire being is tied up with revenge.  
  
This whole night is a leap of faith, and Stiles has no choice but to trust that Derek will keep a handle on it, because he can taste that this will scorch right through him, can feel that Scott couldn’t contain it. Stiles needs to have faith that this will even work, that his own will can hold out.  
  
He makes an effort of will and belief, and the symbol he drew earlier pulses to life, heavy with the pounding of his blood. The beat of it trips, an echo of another heart, and then there are two pulses driving it.  
  
She looks shocked, then amused. “Trying to be a hero, kid? You know this isn’t going to work. You’re a rank amateur at best, otherwise I’d have heard of you, and you’re trying to strip someone born a witch. I’ve been growing my power more than two decades. You think your will can match mine? You think, even if it does, that you’ll be more than a mindless freak when it’s over? I’m going to break you apart and turn you into a puppet, and then I’m going to set you on the wolves, and whatever poor sucker you sliced open isn’t going to protect them at all.”  
  
Stiles just stares at her. He’s not sure he can form words at all right now. Everything she’s said is true. Everything she’s said is true, and her power rages deadly. He can’t contain even this shared portion of it, how will he ever contain all of it, even for an instant?  
  
Her smile’s slick like venom as she leans down to sketch another mark, and no.  
  
No.  
  
Truth is subjective, and she’s a subject with limited knowledge of Stiles. Stiles is not just some poor sucker: he bled himself on purpose. Stiles is not a rank amateur: he’s JV at very worst. Stiles has matched wills with sociopaths, and if he’s come home bloodied, he still hasn’t actually lost.  
  
But yeah, he’s still probably going to die horribly. He still can’t move his feet, and she’s chalking another mark, and she can’t have many left to go.  
  
He falls forward, quite deliberately, and obliterates a mark with his hand. It stings sour, and it’ll only take her a moment to redraw it, but the abrupt shift in orientation has left his feet free to move. He kicks at her, pained and graceless and without as much follow-through as it should have, but he catches her in the knee anyway, and she falls over, catching herself on one forearm.  
  
This may go down in history as the most awkward and flailing showdown ever, and his audience is werewolves, with their preternatural proprioception. Living long enough to never live it down is kind of first prize at this point.  
  
He wants to crawl over there and punch her until she stops moving, but then she’d be able to press assault charges to distract from the charges the state will bring against her. So as satisfying as it would be, Stiles instead holds himself still and grounds himself in the ash and blood and salt surrounding them. He has no sense of the werewolves beyond. Wait, no, he does, it’s just not the sense he’s focused on most, the unnameable one they attribute to shitty psychics and mediums. Media? He really hurts.  
  
Scott’s shouting his name. Derek’s making some dark predator noise that would be terrifying if Stiles hadn’t seen his stash of hair product. Actually, it’d probably be pretty terrifying anyway if Stiles wasn’t having an entire year’s worth of terror consumed by the fire in his veins.  
  
Stiles holds on to the idea that he won’t have to hold all this forever, just for a little while, and starts - inhaling is a bad word, because he’s not using his lungs. Sucking is worse, because, well, yeah. But no matter what the verb for it, he’s pulling power. He’s guzzling it down like he did that Big Gulp when Scott dared him to slam one the summer they were nine. He’d thrown up after that, Orange Crush all over the parking lot, but that’s not the part of the analogy he wants to dwell on right now.  
  
The necromancer’s gotten to her feet and is stomping towards him. He pulls harder. She snarls, low and barely human, and draws back a foot to kick him.  
  
Luckily she aims for his ribs, and he can curve around and catch her leg and pull her down. She goes down hard, and her head cracks against the roof.  
  
The flow of magic feels easier, now, so she must not be conscious to resist. It also feels unending. The sigil’s not designed to work like this, is designed for sharing and easing burdens, and it would be so, so easy to let it serve that purpose, to soothe this burn.  
  
He can’t, though, and he keeps pulling even as the edges of his vision go ash-dark. The necromancer doesn’t get up. It feels like he’s burning up, burning out, but that’s not an option, that’s not okay. He will swallow this down.  
  
“Stiles?” asks Boyd, sounding worried.  
  
Of course. To them, it has to look like the fight’s over, because no one is moving. Stiles can’t reassure them, though, can’t even move. All his concentration is on drinking fire. At last, at last, the flow stutters and slows. Stiles keeps pulling, even though it feels like he’s already burst. He can’t leave her with anything, or she’ll be able to turn this back.  
  
Stiles is pretty sure he’s on fire by the time he’s pulled everything. There’s no other way he could feel this hot and charred and fractured at the seams. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he wills her to be cut off, just wills and believes it will happen, and his will is lava as it flows out and cauterizes her where she touches the supernatural.  
  
Everything is pain and overwhelming, and he thinks he screams, but he’s not sure, because the dark has come to claim him.


	9. 2. Never dwell on past mistakes, especially you, LeBron.

He blinks at the sky and thinks he can’t have been passed out long, because he’s still on fire.  
  
Stiles is on fire and no one is coming to help him.  
  
They’re shouting, though, shouting and growling. What are they shouting?  
  
It’s probably not relevant, because if it were about him they’d be coming to put the fire out.  
  
There’s a reason, niggling somewhere beyond the burning. They’re at a distance because . . . because of a thing.  
  
Shit, the circle.  
  
Aw, hell, he’s going to have to go over and open the circle because of all the stupid mountain ash. He rolls to his side, and it feels like all his bones are kindling. He doesn’t think he can manage to stand, so he doesn’t try, just crawls uncoordinatedly towards the pack.  
  
He scrapes a hand over the line, and it tingles a sharp lemon contrast to the burn. Is he one of the things that can’t pass anymore?  
  
No. The powder stirs and parts, and the circle goes down with a shiver on the air. They surge towards him, all but Peter, who starts for the downed necromancer. Scott’s wide-eyed, but Stiles holds up a hand. “You can’t touch me! Can’t - pack. Derek.”  
  
Words are hard. When did words become hard? Probably when he turned into fire. But there was a plan. A plan that would make the fire stop. The plan said something about Derek, and pack, and spreading out the fire. He shouldn’t spread out the fire: it burns, and Derek doesn’t like fire. Maybe it would burn less if lots of people had it?  
  
No, that’s bad. This is his to carry. But the plan says it isn’t?  
  
It’s probably a stupid plan. Any plan that involves this much pain has to be stupid. Stiles has stupid plans. ‘Let’s go find a body in the woods, Scott’ was a horrifyingly shitty plan. Possibly the worst plan in the history of ever, until this plan.  
  
They crowd around him, but none of them touch him. That’s good? Or bad. One of them. Stiles should stop thinking. Thinking takes his brain, and he needs his brain to remember to breathe, even though he’s breathing fire.  
  
“What do we need to do?” demands Scott.  
  
Peter’s voice sounds far away and disinterested. “He needs to be made part of a pack, so that the power’s shared among them.”  
  
“He is pack!” Scott proclaims indignantly.  
  
“How?” says Derek, a world of pissed off in the syllable.  
  
Oh, right, this is the plan. This is why Scott can’t touch him. Does that mean it’s okay? This is more than he expected. He hadn’t expected to be on fire. Stiles flails an arm and grabs Derek’s shirt - he knows it’s Derek’s, because it’s too tight - and pulls him closer. He needs - he needs a thing. He needs contact. “I just - just -”  
  
Stiles slides a hand up, onto bare skin, and says, “Say I’m yours.”  
  
As soon as he stops bursting with stolen magic, he’s going to dedicate a decade or two to regretting his word choice.  
  
There’s an infinitesimal pause, and then Derek puts his hand over Stiles’, pressing it to his skin. “You’re part of my pack.”  
  
The fire flows out from the point of contact, and he can feel them all, feel Boyd and Erica and Peter and Isaac and Derek where they stand, can feel their pain as power flows into them. Boyd and Isaac shift involuntarily.  
  
Visual input is starting to register as relevant again, and Derek’s eyes are bright unholy red. Scott is still hovering, but he looks confused and faintly betrayed. “You joined Derek’s pack instead of mine?”  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes, highly aware of the fact that he’s still lying on the roof of a gay club with his hand on Derek Hale’s neck, feeling like he’s been set on fire (at some point he should probably apologize to Peter, because this feeling really sucks. Or not), and Scott is mad because he doesn’t get that this is the only way. This is the best answer. This is the way without a body count, without making Scott’s life even worse. “Yeah.”  
  
“Why?” Scott asks. He looks crumpled and hurt.  
  
“Scott,” says Derek, “if he had, you’d be trying to kill us.”  
  
“But you won’t?”  
  
“Scott, can you just go make sure she doesn’t wake up?” They can talk about this later. They can talk about the fact that Scott can just join, too, get over his hatred of being a werewolf and come to terms with the fact that he needs a pack of other werewolves. They can talk about the fact that Stiles didn’t tell him this part of the plan, and that even though they’ve been working together for months, Scott has still made it clear that he doesn’t want Derek as his alpha.  
  
Scott looks stubborn, recalcitrant, but he does what Stiles asks. There’ll be time for guilt over that later, too.  
  
Stiles fumbles his phone out with the hand that’s not touching Derek. He’s not ready to stop touching Derek, in case the fire comes back. He’s also not sure he can stand quite yet, because everything still hurts. He dials his dad and holds the phone to his ear.  
  
“Stiles?”  
  
He takes a deep breath, and his lungs still feel scorched. “Hey, Dad. So, that person who’s been desecrating bodies? She’s kind of passed out on the roof of Jungle right now.”  
  
His dad takes a shaky breath. “Are you okay, son?”  
  
“Uh, yeah. Are you going to arrest her?” What he means is, can we tie her up? Do we need to throw her in the back of the Jeep and take her to the Argents? How much time do we have, and should we clean up the crime scene?  
  
“Oh, yes. You said on the roof?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“We’ll be there in about ten minutes. Text me later.”  
  
Stiles should find more words, to express his gratitude, to say that he should maybe stick around because it’s his blood on the ground, but words are still hard. “Yeah. Bye, Dad.”  
  
He hangs up. “Right, we’ve got eight minutes to get the hell away from here.”  
  
“Can you walk?” Isaac asks.  
  
Stiles quirks an eyebrow at him and starts hauling himself upright by his hold on Derek. “Guess we’re going to find out.”  
  
Derek rises effortlessly, and manages not to dislodge Stiles. His hand is warm and comforting where he’s stabilizing Stiles’ elbow. It occurs to Stiles that the way they’re posed, almost as if for slow dancing, is intimate as hell. Derek isn’t moving away, even though he could, because Stiles isn’t swaying that much.  
  
Stiles makes himself move away, because he has to. Makes himself drop his hand, because he needs to see if the fire comes back. It doesn’t, though an unpleasant buzz kicks up in his head. “Fire escape’ll be fastest.”  
  
“Are we sure she’ll stay out that long?” asks Boyd. “You came around pretty fast.”  
  
“Yes, because I’m such an expert on consequences of things I’ve never done before and never seen accurate firsthand accounts of.”  
  
Peter leans over and tilts the necromancer’s face up, then punches her once, hard, across the jaw. “There we go.”  
  
They all hustle for the fire escape, and Stiles is the last one down. The stairs fade in and out of focus, and Stiles is kind of wishing they’d gone for the murder option, because he wouldn’t feel like such shit. He can’t voice this wish, though, because Scott’d just smile, but his pack might think that this is some new darkness brought on by tainted magic.  
  
Stiles stops on the second-to-last landing, because he thinks he might throw up. Boyd pauses to wait for him, and Stiles pats his arm absently to encourage him to go on. If Stiles is still here when the police show up, he’ll look like the victim, with his blood all over upstairs. No one else has any reason to be here at all.  
  
Strangely, the contact settles the buzz in his head a little. Which, actually, in context of sharing everything with the pack, makes sense. Looks like he’s not going home right away. Stiles stumbles down the last flight, skids down the ladder, and then he’s in the alley with Boyd and Derek and Scott. They’ve only got a couple minutes before they absolutely need to be gone, so Stiles just looks at Derek and says, “I’ll be there after I drop off Scott.”  
  
Derek nods, and he and Boyd disappear down the alley.  
  
As soon as they’re out of sight, Scott whirls on him. “We’re going the long way.”  
  
Stiles nods, and they both start jogging around to the parking lot. He’s fully aware that Scott is going ridiculously slow for him, and also aware of the ticking clock. They not only have to be not on the roof, they have to be plausibly not coming from Jungle if they pass any cruisers, and every Deputy in the county knows his baby on sight.  
  
They get to his Jeep, and Stiles is shaky and buzzing, but not surrendering his keys because yeah, he’s totally fine. He starts it up and pulls out of the parking lot and along the way to Scott’s house. The buzzing gets worse.  
  
Scott’s quiet until the first stoplight. “Why did you have to join his pack?”  
  
“I’m sorry. It’s just - it felt like I was burning alive. Still feels like it, a little bit. And I can share that, share magic, with a werewolf pack.” Stiles accelerates too hard when the light turns green, but lightens up on the pedal quickly so that they steady out just going the speed limit.  
  
“And it couldn’t be me?”  
  
“Scott! You’re only one werewolf. And I love you, man, but this is some serious mojo. You saw Boyd and Isaac shift? That’s because even with all of them, even with Derek’s super-Alpha-whatever, it was still serious mojo. I couldn’t unleash that on you.” He pauses, takes a turn a little too hard. “There’s nothing saying you can’t join his pack, too, so we’re still in the same pack.”  
  
“I - whatever.” Scott huffs out a breath and stares out the window. They’re turning onto his street before he says anything again. “I’m glad you’re okay.”  
  
Stiles jerks his head sideways. “Yeah, me, too.” The buzzing’s gotten worse. He stops at the bottom of Scott’s driveway to let him out. “See you Monday, okay?”  
  
“Yeah, later.” Scott slips out and closes the door carefully behind him. He watches Stiles like he’s not quite sure what to say.  
  
Stiles guns it and drives as fast as he safely can for Derek’s apartment. Everything is itching and buzzing, and it’s like when his ADHD is really bad except worse, worse and with a hint of fire. He parks on the street and calls Derek.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Come let me in.” Stiles pops his seatbelt and opens the door and half-stumbles, half-rolls out. “It’s getting worse.”  
  
When Stiles gets up the stairs to the entrance, Derek is holding the door open. Stiles reaches out to touch his hand, and the buzzing abates, and it’s just such a relief that he stumbles another step or two. He’s in Derek’s space now, and Derek’s just looking at him, a little searching, a little worried. Stiles stares at his ridiculous, perfect face, and then snaps out of it and moves past him. “So it gets better when I’m actually touching one of you, and then gets progressively worse the longer I don’t. Is it okay if I hang out here until we figure out a way that works better?”  
  
“Of course. Come on up.” Derek nods at the elevator, and Stiles punches the up button.  
  
While they wait for the elevator, Stiles sticks his hands in his back pockets and rocks back on his heels. “So, any side effects for you?”  
  
Derek looks at him like he’s an idiot.  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes, but shuts up. He needs to be around his pack right now. Derek pushes the button for the fifth and top floor, and they stand in quiet awkwardness until the elevator opens again.  
  
Derek leads the way to a corner unit and opens the door. The whole pack is inside, Peter with a death grip on the remote and basketball on the TV.  
  
Stiles jerks his chin up in greeting and walks over to flop down on the couch next to Isaac.  
  
Peter doesn’t look at him as he asks, “Did you ever read my email?”  
  
Stiles makes a face at him. “No.”  
  
Boyd sounds overwhelmingly unimpressed when he says, “You let us go through that when you didn’t even have all the available information?”  
  
“It worked, didn’t it?” Stiles snaps.  
  
“You may find it prudent to read now, Stiles.”  
  
“Fine.” Stiles grabs his phone and leans his head against the corner between Isaac’s shoulder and the couch. The contact helps. He pulls up his email app and scrolls for the email from Peter, now buried under a bunch of things he’s never quite bothered to unsubscribe from.  
  
 _Stiles,_  
  
 _We’re dealing with a witch, and the best way to neutralize her will be for you to ambush her._  
  
 _It is possible to strip a witch of their power, though it requires the witch doing the stripping to have innate instead of or in addition to acquired abilities. All it requires is a magical link - which can be forged with shared blood or other bodily fluids, or through magic - and for the witch doing the stripping to overpower the other witch’s will. It’s the same basis as covens, which is why covens usually have more people, to keep anyone from completely stripping anyone else._  
  
 _Covens also allow for individuals to accumulate more power, because it can be shared. If you do this, you’re going to need to share it with a pack. We’re creatures of magic - some more than others._  
  
 _There are limited ways for a human to join a pack. You’re not blood, which rules out the most common way. Funny enough, most of the same ways to join a pack are the same as any other magical link._  
  
 _We could also just kill her, but nothing seems to stay dead around here._  
  
 _Let me know if you have additional questions,_  
  
 _Peter_  
  
Well, that’s a neat summary of days of goddamn research. Stiles flops his head back to stare up at the ceiling. The thing - the worst thing, maybe, other than all the pain - is that Stiles knows he’d have done the research anyway. He doesn’t trust Peter, doesn’t like him, and will set him on fire again if he’s ever given even half a reason. Peter hadn’t helped with Gerard, had barely helped with the alpha pack. His justification had been that the Argents would kill them all, or cage him and torture him. Derek had gotten research out of him, had made him share info with Stiles, but he isn’t a team player, not really, and Stiles is pretty sure he’ll try to kill Derek again, claims of returned sanity or not.  
  
He leverages himself upright, because he’s been sitting still too long and also because he needs to piss, and says, “Hey, Derek, where’s your bathroom?”  
  
Derek looks at him, cocks an eyebrow, but then just says, “Straight back, on the right.”  
  
Stiles wanders back, peering into the open doors he passes. There’s nothing to identify the first bedroom as anyone’s in particular - it’s a fairly personality-free bed, chair, bookcase. Probably Derek’s, then.  
  
The bathroom has more hair products than any three single dudes should ever need, and Stiles is judging them for it. Stiles will probably have to go on at length before they understand how much he is judging them for it.  
  
He uses the facilities and washes his hands and stares at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t look any different, for all that the buzzing’s started up again under his skin and he knows with a sense more than memory that there are five werewolves a few feet away. Maybe paler, but that’s pretty much par for the course. One of these days, all the weird shit in his life is going to leave some visible mark on him, but it’s not today.  
  
Well, not unless he goes all blood-pact-y to reinforce the pack bond. Because he’s pretty sure that’s the problem, that’s the buzzing: it was some kind of magic thing, yeah, but not enough of one. It wasn’t blood by birth or exchange, and there were no other fluids involved except maybe sweat.  
  
Which presented an opportunity. He obviously needed to reinforce the bond somehow, and Derek was all about doing the hard thing to protect the rest of the pack. It’d stop the buzzing on a longer-term if not permanent basis, it’d distract from the awkwardness of earlier, and it’d mess with everyone’s head. That’d be a good enough set of reasons even if he didn’t really, really want to.  
  
He nods at himself in confirmation. Stiles walks back to the living room and says, all casual, “Hey, Derek, we need to swap spit.”  
  
Everyone freezes, and it’s nearly a full second before Erica lets out a peal of laughter and Derek grits out, “Why?”  
  
“Does it matter? C’mon, dude, lay one on me.” Stiles splays his arms out to the sides as if to say ‘come take me.’ Derek doesn’t move, and in fact breaks out the ‘what the fuck’ eyebrows. “For magic reasons,” Stiles says, trying to inject his voice with finality and mysticism.  
  
Derek rolls his eyes, but stands and comes over to Stiles and grabs the back of his head. The buzzing stops. He doesn’t pause or hesitate or make eye contact, just presses his mouth to Stiles’. Stiles - yeah, Stiles would like to take a month or two to just do this, just slide his lips over Derek’s, because it’s really nice, but he’s a man on a mission. A mission to make the buzzing stop permanently and also to confuse the hell out of Derek. Stiles licks into Derek’s mouth, and it’s hot, and he tastes indefinably but headily of concentrated Derek. Soon he’s not going to be able to pass this off as just magic, as just solidifying the bond, so regretfully, Stiles breaks away.  
  
“Well, that was great - seriously, did you take a class or something? - but it looks like that settled the crazy magic thing down, so I’m just going to go.” Stiles makes sure he has all his stuff and beats a hasty retreat.  
  
He’s in the elevator before he realizes that the buzzing hasn’t started up again.


	10. 1. Don’t waste your time watching this crap.

He’s home by one, and takes a melatonin straight off. He remembers to text his dad  
  
 **home safe**   
  
and then brushes his teeth and takes a cursory shower. It’s starting to kick in by the time he’s out of the shower, and Stiles just yanks on a pair of mostly-clean sleep pants before collapsing in bed.  
  
The next nine hours pass in a blink, and then Stiles is turning over, half-conscious, to curl into his pillows and sleep another couple hours. There are no immediate threats, no emergencies, no research. He doesn’t have that much homework. So he can catch up, a bit, maybe sleep all the way until noon.  
  
Twenty minutes later, he gives up his dreams of sleep. He’s logy from too much sleep, and stumbles downstairs to start coffee so it’ll be ready after his shower. There’s a note on the table, and it reads,  
  
 _Come by the station when you’re ready. I’ll be there all day._  
  
Oh, yeah, fleeing a crime scene that had his blood all over might not have been the best thing for his dad, and elections are coming. The vicious surge of adrenaline at everything he has to take care of today to keep everyone safe is almost as good as coffee in terms of waking him up, but far less pleasant. He sets up and starts the machine and goes back upstairs.   
  
As he showers, he works out a plan of action, trying to also factor in the possibility that she’ll press charges against him for assault or something. The election’s this winter, so he can’t be caught up in any of it. They’ll probably run a tox screen, since she was unconscious on the roof of a club, and the window of opportunity on that may have already closed. Then there’s the rest of the physical evidence, the mountain ash and salt and blood and sharpie and chalk. Sharpie’s common enough, and the chalk’s not his problem. The blood, though, is definitely his problem. He needs to text Chris to get the lab to find it’s pig blood or that woman who was stolen from the morgue. He really should have done this last night.  
  
He scrubs shampoo over his hair with more force than strictly necessary, because he’s frustrated with himself for listening to his stupid body instead of taking care of business. He rinses off and drys off and doesn’t bother grabbing his pants from the bathroom floor as he dives for his phone. He calls Chris.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Hey, it’s Stiles. Uh -”  
  
“You left us quite a mess to clean up. At least I presume it was you and not Doctor Deaton using the mountain ash.”   
  
There’s a question in there, and an accusation, and Stiles winces at them both. Right, allies, allies tell each other things, like when their plans might need intervention in the crime lab. He can never mention this to anyone in the (no, his, his now) pack, ever, because he’s been nagging them about teamwork for months. He opens his dresser and grabs clean underwear, jeans, a Tshirt.  
  
“Yeah, sorry about that. Wasn’t really thinking. The plan had been to leave me there to be a really obvious victim, but that ended up not being an option. What happened?” He should offer to do something for the Argents. Barter was totally something he could do now, right? It wasn’t like he had much pocket money, so as long as the favour wasn’t something that would hurt the pack or Scott, he could totally do that in exchange for all the shady crime lab dealings.  
  
Chris’ voice is dry, factual. “This morning’s paper says that police arrested the person suspected of desecrating corpses and setting them on fire, and that she was arrested at a club on an anonymous tip. There’s also a bit about the hallucinogens she was on, and ‘satanic paraphenalia,’ including what’s suspected to be blood.”  
  
“Okay, that’s not completely awful. Oh - uh, except - the blood’s mine. D’you think?” He doesn’t finish the question, can’t quite voice the request that his dad be lied to professionally.  
  
“They’ll find it to be cow’s blood. The kosher butcher in Redding sells it.”  
  
“Okay, that’s great, that’s fantastic. I -” fuck it, grown ups suck it up and address debts and don’t let them bite them in the ass later. He can be a grown up. “I don’t know how to pay you back.”  
  
Chris laughs, and it’s kind of insulting. “Damage control is what we do, Stiles. Just try not to add too much to our workload.” He pauses. “And, if you have more mountain ash, I wouldn’t mind getting my office werewolf-proofed.”  
  
Stiles blinks, surprised. He’d assumed he hadn’t seen Argents using mountain ash because they preferred to just kill rather than contain, not because they couldn’t. Chalk another one up on the tally of ways in which Deaton is cryptic as hell and never explains anything even when actively proffering information. “Yeah, I can do that. Would tomorrow night work? Because my dad wants me to stop by today.”  
  
“That would work for me. Around four o’clock?”  
  
“Yeah, see you then. Bye.” He hangs up, brings the edge of his phone up to his forehead, and presses it there as he lets out a sigh of relief. This is a way better outcome than he had any right to expect. Now it’s just time to go find out if things are fucked at the station.  
  
He finishes getting dressed and fills a travel mug with coffee and hops in his Jeep. There’s still a kitchen knife in the duffel in the back, and he should probably take care of that. Ugh, why did he ever think he could just sleep and things would get taken care of?  
  
The parking lot at the Sheriff’s department is more crowded than it usually is these days, but he still manages to get a parking spot fairly close to the door. He goes in, and the deputy on desk duty just glances at him before buzzing him in. It’s a testament to how much they’ve managed to keep werewolf shenanigans under wraps the past few months that he doesn’t need to make excuses.  
  
His dad looks up when he comes in, turns away from his computer. “Hey, Stiles.”  
  
“You wanted me to come by? What’s up?”  
  
He waves a hand at the door. “Close that, will you?”  
  
Stiles closes it and drops into the chair across from his dad. “What’s up?”  
  
“Whatever you did last night” - he holds up a hand to forestall Stiles talking- “and you can’t tell me, because even if there were good reasons, there was blood on that roof and one of our knives is missing, she confessed to everything. Said she’d confess to anything we wanted as long as we kept her locked up in here. I don’t know how you terrorized her, but it’s left me with an afternoon free, so why don’t we go to the firing range and get you familiar with your gun?”  
  
Stiles is shaking, and all he can think is that the truth just made everything worse. He can’t speak, because there aren’t words that aren’t screamed denials. His dad thinks he could carve up, could threaten someone into submission. That’s not how he works, that’s never going to be how he works, he learned from his dad about responsibility and doing the right thing, and his dad and Scott are joint ferocious moral compasses. So he unbuttons his plaid shirt with trembling fingers and yanks it off his arm and shows his dad the thin red line. It’s a little pink and puffy, but clean, and scabbed over. “Official story,” he says savagely, in a tone he’s never used with his dad, “is that it’s cow’s blood. That’s what the lab will say. And I bet she’s not terrified of me as much as she is the people she was going to kill us to protect herself from, since she’s powerless now.”  
  
His dad looks like he’s been gutted, and says, “Aw, hell.”  
  
Stiles doesn’t look at him, just does his shirt back up.  
  
His dad sits back in his chair. “In my defense, son, yesterday you were talking about murder.”  
  
“Yeah, and after our talk, I decided to do it the hard way.”  
  
They stare at each other. His dad lets out a whoosh of breath. “I’m sorry, Stiles.”  
  
Stiles deflates. Everything in his life is just awful forever. “Yeah, let’s go to the firing range.”  
  
His dad powers down his computer, and then they both rise. As he comes around the desk, his dad grabs Stiles in a hug. He squeezes a little uncomfortably tight and says, “You’re a good kid.”  
  
Stiles hugged his dad back, and knew the sentiment was wrong, because he wasn’t, he really wasn’t. “Please let’s just go shoot things.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well! It's been great. This is the fastest I've written anything in a while, and it's not showing signs of slowing down. More in the series is coming, with Threats from Derek's POV already posted and a Lydia POV story that I'm not going to start posting until it's completely outlined. 
> 
> Thanks for the kudos and kind comments, and I'll attempt to exceed your expectations with upcoming installments.
> 
> Please feel free to stop by uswe.tumblr.com to talk Teen Wolf to me!
> 
> Thanks as always to AlwaysBoth for being a fantastic beta.


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